Zoroastrianism: A Symposium

it's my pleasure to welcome you here on behalf of the program for the study of Religion at UCSD to today's uh Symposium on Zoroastrianism my name is Tony Edwards and I'm a professor in the department of literature of Greek and Latin and I've been asked to do the introductions today and my introduction is going to be brief because I know you came here to hear the speakers and not me and I'm going to begin by introducing uh Professor Jenny Rose she received her PhD from Columbia University in the field of ancient Iranian studies and she comes to us today from Claremont University up in Los Angeles where she teaches in the highly regarded School of religion there uh on the topic of zoroastrian studies uh Professor Rose's book the image of zoroaster the Persian Mage through European eyes appeared in 2000 I believe that was your third book am I correct first book okay well I got the the dates out of order then too many to count really uh but in 2011 she surprised us all with two books in a single year Zoroastrianism in introduction and Zoroastrianism a guide for the perplexed in addition to her scholarly work as a teacher and our researcher Professor Rose has also been involved for many years supporting zoroastrian cultural institutions in North America and in Europe and leading Study Tours to Iran and Central Asia so I'm very pleased to be able to welcome welcome Professor Rose to UCSD today to speak to us on the topic of from sarant to Southern California uh Zoro asrian synopsis so please join me in [Applause] greeting thank you Tony um I'd like to uh thank uh professor keris and the program for the study of Religion as well as the literature department for inviting me to be here today I'm very excited to be I live just up the road but I don't get to visit San Diego often enough so this was a great opportunity my presentation this afternoon is going to focus on the material culture relating to the development of the zoroastrian religion and of course there's immediately a problem with that what is the zoroastrian religion and is it a religion in the way that we understand uh religion as it applies to other religions and that maybe an area that we can talk about after the presentation what we know about the culture that gives rise to the what we call the zoroastrian tradition uh has a very extensive geographical and historical background so my you can tell from the title of my talk that it's going to range geographically even further east than samand to the the Eastern edge of the Silk Road in China and I'm going to kind of Leap Frog all the way back to um Southern California I'm also going to travel that vast historical distance which is about 3,000 years beginning with the Bronze Age in Central Asia which is where we most Scholars estimate the religion to have begun uh founded by its anonomous uh teacher zarathustra who is known as Zoro ASA to the West uh and of course it continues right down into the present day so in the next few minutes I'm going to try and weave together those various historical and Geographic strands into a fairly coherent hole my illustrations come from my own trips that I have led to Iran and to Central Asia uh some of them come courtesy of the British museum who who uh brought to America last year on a five- city tour uh exhibitions relating to the Cyrus cylinder I don't know whether any of you saw that exhibition uh and also I'm going to use some illustrations from a recent groundbreaking exhibition that was held at the school of Oriental and African studies at the University of London uh called the Everlasting flame Zoroastrianism in history and Imagination that I was fortunate enough to um be able to contribute to so I want to begin with uh Central Asia which is sorry which is where the uh most Scholars now think was the the kind of beginning ground the originating uh area for the uh the what we now call the the zoroastrian religion after the Indians and the Iranians had separated into two distinct groups at the end of the third millennium BCE for the next millennium or so they wandered through this area on the from the the euros and Southern Siberia oh on their way towards uh what became India and Iran respectively during that time the uh Indians generated their own oral religious tradition which is known collectively as the Vaders those poems that are to do with uh knowledge or Insight Vader is connected with video to so seeing and the uh ancient Iranians created their own um Corpus of oral literature these are both oral Traditions known as the avesta which means something like praise and uh these Traditions remained oral for about 2,000 years the oldest part of the aester is referred to as the gas the songs or poems that are attributed to zarathustra now many people will tell you that zarathustra means something like golden light or Golden Dawn probably the most accurate translation even though it is fairly mundane is is relates to the the one who owns old camels or Fierce camels and uh if you think about the origins of the this avestan tradition in a in a kind of mobile pastoralism in the Central Asian step land then you can understand the the significance of that name and when I was in Kazakhstan uh last spring I saw evidence of such nomadic life well camel herding is still you know quite quite prominent and and Kazakhstan of course is one of the the most likely points of origin for the religion there's an an aveston text that refers to the original land that was created for the Iranians by aora Mazda and it was called Ariana vaa the Arian or the Iranian expanse and this text explains how this original Iranian Homeland orig was was the best of places until it was assaulted by the vent of a harsh winter that lasted 10 months and and one of the regions that Scholars think embodies this this area is Kazakhstan but also we think that the early Iranians as they moved through settled in the various sorry settled in the various uh areas what is now can you see a light there um so what is now this the old Soviet republics of the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan usbekistan turkistan uh kyrgistan Tajikistan and and Northern Afghanistan so they settle in this general area before moving on to the plateau of what is now modern Iran and we don't have any evidence for the existence of an Iranian peoples on the plateau until between the 9th and the 7th centuries BCE when we have Assyrian texts that tell us that the Assyrian Kings were receiving tribute from peoples called the mes and the Persians and they sorry they're living in this general area to the southwest of the Caspian Sea uh around this area this is aeran Iranian aeran and down into keran sha we don't have any tangible evence evidence of the Iranian existence on the plateau so I can't tell you anything about the material culture of what become the zoroastrians at that stage but we do know that by the late 6th Century there a Persian group had moved down to this area and established themselves and started building uh monuments and that was under the uh great uh ancient Persian king zyus II who's also Osirus the great uh at a place that the Greeks called pasargad and that Pasar is the first kind of example of monumental uh building and iconography that we can connect with the ancient Persians it included a palace complex with a four-part garden and a massive tomb that was the tomb of Cyrus the structures and the layout at pasari present a visual articulation of ancient Persian worldview uh and that's quite important because there are no contemporary Iranian language texts that refer to Sirus in fact there are no contemporary Iranian language texts at all there's the oral text of the aesta what we have though alongside that are biblical texts the book of Isaiah Ezra two Chronicles and also Greek references to Cyrus and his rule the first actual text the first physical handleable text that we have that belongs to the time of Cyrus is written in um an ancient Babylonian cuni form and it is uh this small act artifact that was discovered in a temple Precinct in Babylon in the late 19th century it was made just after Cyrus's capture of Babylon in 539 BCE so it's over 2,500 years old and it was a foundation brick that was put in the threshold of the renovated Temple of Muk who was the chief Babylonian god of the city in the inscription Cyrus portrays himself as being in line with previous Kings whose rule was authorized by local gods and you find that in those biblical text that I mentioned Isaiah Ezra and two Chronicles a similar view of Cyrus appears he's uh called in in the biblical books by the god of Israel The God Who is in Jerusalem so if at this point in time the the around 530s just the post exilic period in in Biblical history if zyus is self-defining himself as being called by the god of the Babylonians and called by the god of the of the Israelites what evidence do we have that he actually worshiped aora Mazda the wise lord of the avesta well we have a few Clues uh at Pasar one major clue to me is just on the other side of the palace complex and Precinct there's a a hill uh and the hill looks down onto an area that's now defined as the sacred Precinct and in the sacred Precinct there are two plinths uh that are the same date as the other monuments found at pasargad so the late 6th Century BCE they're white Limestone plants and you can see that the one on the right has stairs uh going up it and we find in later ancient Persian iconography on the tomb of dasas I first who succeeded Cyrus's son cises to the throne that uh and on later ancient Persian tombs the king is standing on a stepped plin so this is the king here facing a burning fire that is on another stepped plinth and we found examples of fire holders like this at pasara so we know that fire was an important element of ancient Persian worship uh in the avesta and in later uh middle Persian text fire is an emblem of the order the right or the truth AER uh of aora Mazda that permeates the world and in the godes of course aor Mazda is associated with the sun and the Sun is the greatest of cosmic fires the fire holder appears on Ancient Persian bar reliefs and personal seals such as here you can see again it's blazing in a container with a stepped uh top and base and look at these two people here they are represent Magi or um ancient Persian priests just look at uh what they're wearing and what they're holding and we'll come back to that in a second H the so fire then becomes a standardized Motif um that's later featured on the bronze coinage of the second Iranian Empire that of the parthians who rule from about 247 BCE to 224 CE and it also appears on the coinage as here of the third Iranian Empire that of the cenan Persians um who come to power in the early 3rd Century of the Common Era and rule until the middle of the 7th Century of the Common Era and this is a coin of the first sorry first uh cenan King aresia I first uh and you can see again that iconography of the stepped fire holder uh but in this case it's add it's got uh the legs of an ancient Persian Throne added to it so we know that in the cenan period this Unity between religion and Rule was seen to be kind of symbiotic and and we'll come to the to the cenans later and and look at how they um develop the the religion of course fire Still Remains Central to zorian places of worship today this is from the main Fire temple in Yas Iran which is still a what may be called a Zoro Asian stronghold in Iran and uh and this is the uh fire at the California zasan Center just up the roadways the earliest tangible reference that we have to aora Mazda in Iran in an Iranian context is on this huge high up stone relief uh at a place called behistun or bizon that's on the road between hamadan and uh which is in caraman sha Iran and Babylon there's a trilingual inscription and all this is the inscription in Persian Elite and Cadian uh that tells how dasas I first came to rule with the support of aora Mazda at a time when the LIE had become rampant dasas States on this inscription this is dasas here and this is the Persian this is the old this is the first one of the first examples that we have of old Persian uniform inscription he states on the uh inscription a hor Mazda bore me Aid because I did not side with the evil one I was not a liar I did nothing crooked neither I nor my family I walked in straightness the Persian King's declaration is in keeping with the ethos of the gas and the later aveston text which you remember still oral at this stage where both men and women are urged to choose the order the rightness that was established by aora Mazda not the bad thoughts the words and actions that were intrinsic to evil and the lie in the avesta this tension between following the straight path or being crooked or deceitful is understood to operate in both the cosmological and the ethical spheres the Mater the material Level but also at the the conceptual or thought level so the the dualism that you often hear referred to as being part of Zoran tradition isn't a division between mind and matter so much as it is a vertical split between that which is good and that which is evil in a in a later inscription uh on the facade of his tomb dasas the first again using language and them that are very similar to the aesta Praises aor Mazda as the great God who established the Perfection that can be seen who established this Earth and that Sky who established humanity and happiness for Humanity and who bestowed wisdom and Agility on dasas these qualities of agility and wisdom are Illustrated on this Royal seal of dasas you can see the king in his Chariot hunting Lions uh underneath a a uh figure within a winged solar dis now both the the winged genius and the Royal hunt were themes that are familiar from Mesopotamian Royal iconography but here there's a particular kind of old Persian ancient Persian slant and the scene suggests a Persian victory over all the forces of Destruction and disorder aided by the Divine Fortune that's been bestowed on the King by aora Mazda and this particular reading of the image is supported by an inscription at pepolis in which dasas asks aora Mazda to protect the country from a hostile Army from a bad Harvest and from the lie so he wants aora Mazda's Aid to protect him and the the country from physical assault from natural disaster and from internal corruption again this is an example of an old Persian inscription and an iconography that mirrors the aveston concept that evil operates within both the material and the mental spheres and we know from Herodotus that great father of History the Greek father of history that all Persian boys learned to combat evil in both domains Herodotus says that Persian boys were taught three things to ride a horse to shoot a bow and to tell the truth many ironists and zoroastrians too would hesitate perhaps to define the Mazda worship of the ancient Persians as zoroastrian particularly because there are no old Persian references to zarathustra and Herodotus and xenophon neither of them mentioned zoroaster either but the Glimpse that these ancient Persian inscriptions and iconography provide into their religion indicates that it was close to the avesta and therefore must be considered to be part of what we could call an evolving Zoroastrianism uh an evidence for the practice of the religion across the Persian Empire is found in this gold plaque which uh was discovered at Tajikistan there's a male figure again reminiscent of those priests on the seal that we saw earlier he's wearing a uh a hooded cap with a chin flap and the chin flap could be drawn across the mouth it's it something that Nomads would wear and still do if they're on Horseback they don't want to get dust or flies like a motorbike visor in them in their mouth but it in in a Priestly context it it was and still is used within the zoroastrian tradition so it's not the saliva and the breath won't pollute the fire uh he's carrying a bundle of Twigs here which are or seem to be the sacred Twigs or the barom that only zaro asan priests hold today when they're performing ritual so he's often defined as a as a Mago which is the old Persian word for priest and mages are but the fact that he's work he he's got a scabbo with a short sword of a Persian ainak the Greeks call it um indicates that maybe he was a member of a royal family or or of nobility and not a priest so this comes from Tajikistan at the Far Eastern end of the Empire the ancient Persian Empire on the Far West western side of the empire in Anatolia we have this uh Steely probably marking a a tomb a funerary Steely which has a similar iconography of men with pointy hats and chin straps over their mouths holding the uh sacred Twigs which are the Barson the there is a passage in the avesta that uh Advocates wearing a a mouth covering so as not to pollute the fire so it's through Anatolia in the late 4th Century BC that Alexander of Macedon and his troops begin their conquest of the Persians Greek military victories were conquered right AC were con Consolidated right across what had been the ancient Persian Empire uh through marriage alliances between uh Greek officers and Persian women and that Trend was started off by Alexander who marries uh Ro Shana the daughter of a batian king batia is in Northern Afghanistan where uh Alexander had reached by 327 BCE so soon Greek culture and Aesthetics had extended right the way across the former ancient Persian Empire as far as Afghanistan and Northern India and there is a a a site that was excavated at aanam in Northern Afghanistan just South of the tajiki Border that has a Greek Theater uh a gymnasium in Greek style and houses with Corinthian columns such as this one Greek became the language of diploma and currency and it used to be thought that the religion itself became heniz but we found a lot of evidence in recent years to indicate that there was a a strong um affiliation to a veston beliefs and practices that continued not just in pars Province parisis uh which was the where the ancient Persians had had come from but also right the way across the Empire and uh we know this because we have evidence of uh another group of uh Iranians who come to power in this area here who are known as the parthians the parthians um kick off that they they they kind of dispense with Greek uh rule in the mid3 century BCE and uh they're reinforced by groups of other Iranians that come in from outside but they move slowly from this kind of Homeland area all the way across to conquer uh salua the Greek city and babon the tigis and Babylon on the Euphrates by about 140 BCE and coin that were minted by the Greek the by the parthan king that was part of that uh initial incursion have a Greek style to them but there's also a kind of Iranian twist to that Greek style the King was named mithradates um he it looks like a very Greek coin the language is Greek the iconography is Greek the King has got the Greek diadem uh he is described as the great king basileos mealo araku orasis Phil Helen the one who is a lover of things Greek and this seems to be Heracles very Greek uh image but we know from later uh iconography that quite early on the Iranians identified their own yazatas or these are beings worthy of worship divinities with Greek iconography Herodotus is the first one to make that that that jump he identifies the the god of the persans a Zeus rather than a hor master um so this is it maybe herles but it may also be Verna who is the Iranian yazata of Victory and we know that later in the pathian period these two are given the Greek name as Heracles and the Persian the the Iranian name is rth ragna we get a significant amount of information uh about the parthan religion parthan form of the religion from this site here it's at Old Nissa in Turk Menon which is also sometimes referred to as Mithra K the place that was built by mithradates and there's a wine Celler this is this is oh this is renovated by the Italian and Turk men they're kind of rebuilding it but of to here is an area that wasn't yet renovated where they found uh 2,000 over 2,000 pot shards um ostria that uh dated between the the first century BC and the first decade of the Common Era and they are receipts transactions between merchants in Old Nissa and uh people who are buying wine or barley or other goods and as you know when you sign your name on a a chip when you roll scroll your credit card through it's got the date on and it's got your name on so we know from the names that many of the people who engaged in these transactions were Zoro had Zoro asrian names they're called um or mazik the one who worships a hor Mazda Dean Mazda the one who follows the mazdan religion faren bag the one who prospers through the fa the Divine Fortune of Glory araish the one who follows the best order and the dates also tell us that the parthians stuck to the aveston calendar using aveston months and day names rather than the Greek and there are also references to the titles of people so we have someone who's an art a lord of the fire a Mago a general priest a mugot one who is the the chief priest and even a Bugan poath a temple priest literally that term means the um Master of the Gods and around the time that these uh clay receipts were being written in northeastern Iran at the other end of the Empire strabo who's the Greek historian living just south of the Black Sea in the IC region describes a Persian Priestly ritual and he says the that worship took place in a sizable enclosure in the middle of which was an altar with a large heap of Ashes where the Magi keep up a fire that is never put out these Magi he said hold their bundles of rods before the fire and they wear turbans of felt which reach over their cheeks to cover the lips stros accounts is is the oldest written account of Zoro asan is actually tending a fire uh and we find parean coin from just after the time of strabo uh that have a fire holder on them so we know and and these are Patheon coins that start to be written in parean rather than in in Greek script the photo that you have here is just U below the big uh relief of dasas at bizon and it shows again the fire older with an individual making an offering to fire he could be a priest but the fact that he's not got his mouth covered and that he's got a diadem rather than a a Priestly hat probably indicates that he's a he's a royal figure there is another Outsider text apart from strabo just a bit later than strabo that uh also refers to magi the and the activity of the Magi these Magi are not feeding a fire but they're following a star from the East to Bethlehem and uh that of course is St Matthew's gospel this is uh obviously much much later and further away from Jerusalem than Matthew's gospel but it's a Byzantine representation of the Magi coming to bring gifts to the Christ child and of course by now they've been identified as three because of the three gifts but the fact that the Byzantine still identify you could by their clothing they're identified as pathans with the typical leggings and tunics and pointy hats that are identified as being uh parthan it's from this period that we have the oldest identified remains of fire temples um this one is a Mele hyam in Turkmenistan the parthan Homeland it had a central rectangular Hall here that led on to a um a square room with four columns and arches it had a doed roof over the top and probably this area at the back was where the fire was kept burning and it was brought out to be placed on top of this fire plinth here um after the pathans were in power for over four centuries which was a heck of a long time and not many people know a lot about the pathans which is odd because they're the ones that keep the Romans at Bay for all that most of that period um they're defeated of course not by the Romans but by their co-religionists the cenan Persians and the defeat of the parthians is marked in this relief of ardashir the first the first cenan king and it's a uh it's a victory relief as much as it is an investure relief here you have aora Mazda who's identified by by an inscription here he's holding the baram the sacred Twigs he's offering the ring of power to ardashir who's here the two are on Horseback so they're equal ardashir in his um in the inscription and on his uh coinage describes himself as the Mazda worshiping Majesty or the Mazda worshipping Lord who is of the seed of the Gods and his horses who rests on the top of the last paean king aravon and the hoof of aor asda's horse rests on the being that the entity that epitomizes evil angru the destructive Spirit or the spirit of evil so it's as much a uh material victory over a previous regime as it is a kind of cosmological victory of good over evil that is is represented in this iconography it's during the cenan period that the religion it's is becomes much more institutionalized you get a rise of a Priestly hierarchy uh and what you might say is an emergent Orthodoxy although I hate using Orthodoxy in that but it's the it's a it's the time within which that the avesta becomes uh kind of standardized uh and its interpretation but as you'll see in a couple of minutes that uh interpretation and the way it's manifest is is has other ramifications arish successor sh Paul the first in a long inscription carved on this Tower here which faces the ancient pran tombs and here's the inscription um says that he's endowed sever several sacred Fires for himself his Queen and his three sons uh and he's also says he offers daily offerings for the The Souls of deceased members of the royal family and it's under shaur I first and his several of his successors that that a priest named kerer who's depicted here becomes a forceful proponent for the Mazda worshiping religion ked's accounts of the spread of the religion during this period record the establishment of Many religious institutions at his own expense including fire temples and kered says that he he himself paid for many rituals to be performed most of the excavated remains of zoroastrian fire temples date to the cenan period um one of perhaps the most important sites is that tan it was one of the three great fires um that the cenan um well the middle Persian text refer to as being ancient by the time the cenans came to power um it burned in this in this Sanctuary which you can see has the four pillars and the and the The domed Arches just like that at Mele Haram and a place in the center where the fire plinth would have been we also have many seals that date to the uh late cenan period and they tell us about the spread of the institution of the priesthood there are lots of them that refer to Mo or MOG it's the middle Persian form of ma Maes Mages Magi so it's referring to the priesthood or mpat or mad the the priest the chief of the priests and we know that priests were not just responsible for running fire temples but they also had control in several instances of subd districts or whole cities and they were also responsible for um economic transactions including the endowments of fires and and payments of religious fines now I said that zarus isn't mentioned in any old Persian text he doesn't appear either in any parean or cenan text but this investig scene we have at T an in caransa Province that's Northwestern Iran um it shows another investure later investiture with the hor Mazda probably giving the ring of power to uh probably ardashir and on the left you have this image of a uh Divine entity holding the sacred barisone with this raid Nimbus uh and he's usually understood to be a portrayal of Mithra who is the the yazar this Divine being who's in control of the the bond or the contract um but what happened in the 19th century is that when zoroastrian visitors came to this site they saw this image and they thought that's zarra and so this form becomes used uh as a template for illustrations of zarathustra that began to appear in a kind of quazi um Sunday school kind of imitation from the mid 19th century uh onwards at takan we have a huge relief of one of the last cenan kings HRA II KRA parvis uh on his warhorse shabd and I'm just going to show you a a closeup of of his cloak here I don't know whether you can see it very clearly but the cloak has kind of roundel motif Lees on with an image inside this is the seamor the seor is the SAA Mera in the avesta the SAA bird that sits on top of the tree of all seeds and when the SAA bird Rises and flaps its wings the seeds from the tree are dispersed throughout the land and give rise to all the plants and vegetation in the world um and the seamor is also associated with healing it in cenan iconography it appears to have been depicted with um the head of a dog the the claws or Paws of a of a wolf or lion uh with wings and then the the tail of a peacock and it's a motif that in the cenan period spreads to the East and to the West on cenan Metallurgy as well as on uh silk am I doing okay time M I've got I've got half a page left um and this is an example of of you you can see it on it's on the silk Ro robes that appear uh on a mural of Iranian delegates to the the court of summer count which is where the king of the sogdians uh had his uh residence sogdiana is an Eastern Iranian sat tropy where the religion continues and is expressed in ways very different to the ways that it's expressed in cenan Iran but all three of these delegates have robes that are portrayed as having what we might call a veston motifs zasan motifs it this this discovery in the court at Samaran reminds us that uh religions weren't static at all during the cenan period mid3 to Mid 7th period there's a heck of a lot of movement of peoples and ideas and goods uh all the way from well really from Rome but through Iran through former pathia which is now well pathia is here soana is modern usbekistan all the way on either side of the tuam Maan desert to the Eastern Ed of end of the Silk Road dun hang and onto the Han and then the Tang Chinese capital and Shian I want to just stop here the the sogdians go all the way along this they develop a network that goes all the way along here and we have records from dun hang dating to the 4th Century of the Common Era that tell us about soan zoroastrians living there then there's a a PO in a post bag that was discovered in 19 1907 we have actual letters that date to the fourth Century of the Common Era from this they include two from this woman mun the first one is from mun to her husband nanat and nanat apparently got into debt and run away from home and she's very cross with him this is the one to her mother who's back in samand Thousand or so miles away and uh she's explaining to her mother she says I live wretchedly without clothing without money I've asked various members of the local soan community to help me out they haven't helped me so I've had to rely on a temple priest for charity and the word that she uses for temple priest in this letter is bugen poot it's the same word that you find on the the ostra Nissa the the the lord of the the Temple of the gods or the the one who is chief of the Temple of the Gods um so it tells us that by this time fourth Century of the Common Era there's a sizable enough sogdian Zoro astian community in dun hang to have a temple to have a temple priest and we know that from 8th Century Chinese documents the temple is described on the Eastern edge of dunan and it goes on into the 10th Century documents still recorded then we also know from a discovery of a 9th century soan text found in the library cave in in dun hang proper it's amongst 40,000 other texts that were found there Buddhist maniki and all kinds of other text but there's this one soan zoroastrian text uh that dates to the 9th century that they were still practicing and um it's this text it it's this bit is the form it's written in soan but it takes uses a kind of aest a vestern terms and wording it talks about the uh the most holy and ancient uh what who did it say the perfect righteous zarathustra meeting an unnamed excellent supreme god which we assume is aor Mazda in The Fragrant Paradise in good thought and no one knew initially what the first two lines of the text were until one scholar said it's the Hashem who it's one of the most ancient zoroastrian prayers that is still recited by zoroastrians today on a daily basis and uh it predates this text predates all any ofest manuscript from Iran or India by 300 years at least so the most ancient artifact that we have that is a piece of scripture was found in at the Eastern end of the sink Silk Road in what is modern day China uh evidence for Zoro asan practices um back in the sogdian Homeland come from Fresco such as this one that's in a palace near samand where you see the the local King making an offering to the fire uh we have fragments of fire holders we have actual fire holders that were found in uh sdan modern day usbekistan and Tajikistan and we also have uh uies bone boxes that were used to hold the uh bones of the dead after they'd been exposed and the exposure of the Dead was a practice that is advocated in the avesta and is referred to by outside observers from Herodotus onwards uh you can see this ocer that was found near samand has a seated priest holding either the Baris some or Twigs to feed the fire in that iconographic fire holder there he's got this huge face mask there and there this is the assistant priest the raspy with another mask feeding the fire with the tongs uh probably the the ceremony performed on the fourth day after death to to as the soul makes its way across the the bridge of accounting or Bridge of Reckoning this ocy was discovered only in 2012 at yalaka teepe which is about 50 m South of samand and uh it's the similar iconography of the fate of the Soul after death you have the priest here with his face mask um performing the ceremony to to ease the Soul's passage into the next World you have the the yazata the the the being um Divinity here rashnu who meets the Soul at the entrance to the bridge and who weighs the soul and this is the the soul represented as a naked body here uh and this is the paradise where good thought dwells vum filled with music we don't find any similar iconography to this in sasanian Iran so this is you know when we talk about Zoroastrianism we have to be careful that we don't think of it as monolithic at this stage it has various um representations and forms so in the well let's go back a bit in the mid what in the mid 7th Century the incursion of Arab Muslims into Iran brings an end to cenan zoroastrian rule and not long after that the demise of the zoroastrian religion in Western Central Asia many zoroastrians leave Iran they follow peros who's the son of the last cenan king all the way over the mountains through Afghanistan towards the Tang Dynasty Court in China other take a sea route they follow the the the sea course the trading sea course and end up on the Northwestern coast of India where they become known as pares the people from pars Persia Paris Province today California has the largest Zoro asrian Community outside of Iran and India and the majority live in southern in the southern part of the State and uh these are two mobeds performing a ritual in uh for my students at Claremont Graduate University and I think it's I just put that in so that we see a new stage in the evolution of the religion as it moves into the new world thank [Applause] you sorry bit long thank you for that Jenny um Professor Rose will be happy to entertain questions but we're going to hold and I'm sure you have some I've got them written down here myself but we're going to hold them uh until the end of the program and you can ask questions of all three of our speakers at once then so hang on to your questions and uh we'll give you a chance at the end of the program okay um well now it's my pleasure to introduce both a colleague and a friend Dana Keras who is in the department of literature here at UCSD where she's an associate professor uh Professor kera's teaching is largely devoted to ucsd's program for the study of Religion which relies on her expertise in the area of early Christianity she received her PhD from Brown University's distinguished program in the history of religion and before coming here before we were successful and successful in luring here to UCSD she taught at Stanford for 3 years as a melon fellow every time I get to that that that melon fellow thing I I'm afraid I'm going to screw it up I I listen to someone introduce a melon fellow once as a Melo felon and she's NE she but anyhow I and now I managed to get my tie stuck on something um I'm falling apart okay so um Professor call Claris has published articles on topics uh of the holy man martyrdom demonology all in the context of the Roman Empire and we eagerly await the imminent appearance of her city of demons violence ritual and Christian power in late Antiquity which is due this year from the University of California press uh Dan is currently at work on a new book with the working title unexpected demons and their holy men an anthropological approach to reading hagiography but today Professor Keras will be addressing us on on the topic of zoroastrian Legacy devils and demons in early Christianity so please join me in welcoming danana Colores to the podium thank you very much okay great okay so uh first off I want to thank uh Professor Rose for that Illuminating lecture and I feel as though uh generally I uh begin my talks they're framed by questions and you've answered all of them so I feel as though I don't have anything to say at this point uh I could to sit down uh and once I start this lecture you may want me to uh why is someone who is an expert in well expert why is someone who works in early Christianity myself uh up here uh well first off I have been fascinated with zarrian ISM for quite some time because of the fact that I work in early Christianity and predominantly because of the fact that my special focus is in demonology uh often times when I teach early Christianity inevitably I have a student who brings up the connections the early connections between earliest demonology the devil demons to uh what happens what existed within uh zor asrian ISM and asks about Connections and uh for years I would say well I simply don't know so I thought the best way to have a connection here was to do research of my own for a few years and invite some people here uh what I want to accomplish today in today's lecture really is a journey of questions and inquiries in my own research and searching for the earliest uh Inc uh incarnations and the earliest characterizations of the devil and demons I often do find these trajectories these directional um uh directional signposts and scholarship most of this scholarship is older scholarship or it's a more generalistic scholarship and uh what this scholarship in religion what I would term here for today earlier traditional scholarship in religion has told me over and over again through the years that if I want to fully understand Christianity's devil and its demons I must look across commonly shared lands in the medit ranean through the Fertile Crescent in the East to the much earlier moment in time when polytheism in the Indo European World stretched out through various experimentations with henotheism and dualism through to monotheism now I stand here because a number of times in my study of early Christian demonology and the devil I've come across the word zor I've come across images of a time when Aura Mazda Rose above the other gods and uh goddesses and declared Supremacy and a uh more important figure for my own study uh an angr Manu wrote sunk deeply very very deeply into his place of uh as the enemy or the uh the exact opposition to hasta where my study of dualism in Christianity would seem to inherit these dualisms of one of the only early religions Z of Zoran zor asrian ISM uh it would seem to invite more study for me the question had always been can I actually trust these invitations can I trust this scholarship and here is a place where I would say that I join very clearly uh in agreement with what Professor Rose has to say her comments that have to do with the fact that we cannot trust the idea of isms or we cannot trust the idea of there being a monolithic notion of zor asianism the same holds true for Christianity we can't hold true to notion there's one Christianity and there can be similar linguage simple simplifying languages between between two religions at any time and place and what's interesting is that it's just recently when religious Scholars have begun to break down that notion of the monolithic within our study of these phenomena now to be fair Zoroastrianism does not dwell alone in its demonological or dualistic relation to Christianity there is another religion that has always stood on its path in the scholarship this earlier scholarship and that is exilic and postexilic Judaism also has stood as a way station between the two indeed Babylonian and post Babylonian or second temple Judaism from uh the 6th century through to 70 CE 6th Century BCE through to 70 CE has stood there and in its dualizing practices and discourses Judaism has made a sudden leap in this time period from a supposed monotheism from ancient Israelite religion that contained a good deal of polytheism actually uh if one is willing to read the Hebrew Bible with an open eye and if one is willing to read the Hebrew Bible with an open eye one discovers standing along l and or Yahweh were many other gods in the ancient Israelite religion while priests were trying to strip out of their practice many people surrounding these priests wouldn't listen ball of course is one of these priests that made the idea of monotheism within Israelite religion or Judaism a complicated concept at that time period so if we take a moment to move toward the Western end of the Mediterranean we may look toward another religion that stands before or or a phenomena a set of texts a set of practices that can lead to the idea of a phenomena that uh has dualizing Tendencies within it platonism after the monad and the good or the one emerges within platonic text and commentary we have the beginnings of a fetal religion toward middle platonic and neoplatonic movements and these earliest texts even with Plato and then as they're developed further on Within within the later texts with uh platinus and then with the omus what had been neutral diones which once stretched between upper echelon of deity and human beings gained darkening moral color in plutarch's eyes in particular eventually ritual P practice in the material realm and theories of the mystical and the mystagogical help underline potential dualities later in neoplatonism in late antiquity we have a certain lending of an intellectual girth to Christianity's notion of light and dark Divine and demonic Christ versus the devil dualizing here that is is between this idea we do see a dualization between the notion of the the body and the mind which you were talking about earlier and which I think is a very interesting mixture that we see eventually in Christianity both the dualizing between the body and the mind the dualizing that has the the vertical dualizing that you discussing is as well before going further however I should clarify what I have in mind okay between when I use the phrase earlier traditional scholarship in religion these are all texts that I generally do not fully rely upon in terms of making uh making commentaries making my own choices in terms of demonology in Christianity what did the earliest accounts of the devil say and early Christianity what did the earliest counts of the Demonic say in earliest Christianity many of these texts most of them come out of a worldview that affected religious studies in the 19th century many of them have been born from evolutionary ways of looking at religion many of them have been born from a comparativist way of looking at myth within religion so what I would like to do is to speak for a moment or two about these methodologies and I should clarify a little bit further what I have in mind when I use the phrase earlier traditional scholarship then I speak here of traditional methods and I refer to a variety of methodologies in the study of the history of religion that quickly gained a following uh a following and popularity at the end of the 19th century and it was a popularity that continued past the mid-century of the 20th these were methods used by Scholars consumed by an Impulse to discover Origins determine religious evolutions and uncover structures that would reveal comparative consistency in the odysse consistency or inconsistencies and theodes theologies cosmologies ethics morals and so forth comparative mythology is one such method that gains strong footing after James Frasier's golden bow and this method of interpretation impacted the study of the relation between abrahamic and Indo European uh religions so another example is the relig gik which has also helped to strengthen this view that commonalities can be uncovered CED if we progress in an evolutionary way the idea that religions move from polytheism through to dualisms through to dualisms through to the idea of uh then eventually to monotheisms and that all religions progress according to this model and once we have that model in place we can make comparisons among religions most earlier methods then have helped to inscribe a certain notion a simplifying notion of the way that we can compare religions from the medit all the way through to the Indo European world and what we have and you see in a lot of uh earlier texts that compare world religions is a a straight line particularly when looking for monotheisms in the early in the ancient world very uh relatively straight line leading from Zoroastrianism to Judaism and then into Christianity when looking at issues or images of the Demonic and or the devil that line is relatively uh straight from Zoroastrianism to Judaism and Christianity in text today that talk about General texts that talk about the devil a history of the devil zor asterism is commonly identified as having the original view of what the devil looks like or what demons look like and Christianity drawing through Judaism to find that image as if Christians can reach very easily back in time and gain images of of uh of that time period hundreds centuries before to find that image and and created within Christianity so the question is how valid is that particular methodology famous mythologist George dumil from the mid-century located fragments of the devil and radical zoroastrian reforms part of his theory which was extremely popular in the mid-century was that zarrian ISM had had radical dualities had radical dualities and his view of Zoran asterism when it talking about the devil was one which was redective in which the dualities were without throughout zor asterism so was an ahistorical look at the religion one side of this du dualism produced the evil spirit the LIE angr Manu and to that end he jeop poses angamu with the trickster god Loki as well as the Christian God the devil more likely there are similarities between these three than there are differences my question when reading texts such as these is simple I've seen again and again throughout this notion of angu as the devil the deceiver and Professor Rose brought this up too the idea of angamu as the lie and the deceiver so my question is can is this something that is valid within the history throughout soou culturally can we actually contextualize this view or is this a particular view that has been created within zor arism this is something that's been created by scholars in a much later period And if it's the former can this be in some way helpful in making comparisons directly to Christianity in which way what can how can how could it be a valid comparison in Dum mail's words everything that does not come from aora MAA proceeds from angamu in his words again such a radical dualism leaves the job of creation clear angamu and his dvas or or demons engage in work that is absolutely to thwart the omniscient Lord whether by destroying what he makes or or by producing in turn counter Creations while this is a view tied to the mid-century it has come through to push the same type of comparative agenda today so for instance in his 1996 history of the devil the well-known historian and cultural critic Gerald masadi looked 600 years before the Common Era to find the genealogical beginning of the devil in his words the true birth of the devil and thus the conception of a belief in the devil however small began and I know that the I'm not doing this to to create some sort of anxiety about what the answer could be uh lies at the root of religious fanaticism today and that may be located in zarrian ISM and more specifically in the figure of angram manum what is not only a productive comparative project can turn out to be a dangerous comparative project when you have descriptions of the Dem demic framed in such a way such simplifying connections that have dictated General Studies of the Christian devil today all too often have dualisms that dictate angram manu's characterization and thus deterministic relation to Judaism and Christianity and the question is can we not have zorran ISM standing on its own in terms of its descriptions of this figure if there is anything that can be treated within this religion that can be compared to Christianity how do we pull apart different parts of the this religion to make a comparison that is not contextualized in such a manner in many of the sto many of the scholarship that I've read I see I read the following dualistic uh characterizations angamu is stuck in a Stupify Darkness robbing him of knowledge he sees but cannot know a does light he covets it Longs for it lusts for it determines to possess it he is described holistically as the Destroyer the accursed destructive Spirit who is all wickedness and full death a liar and a deceiver dark and evil Limited in time and space he's the essence of Destruction and finally in his dualistic again dualistic in that category of dualism is something that emerges again and again and his dualistic relation to hamda we have the idea of pure goodness with the hamda compared to and conquering over Pure Evil and a choice that they each make that is rendered ontologically theologically eternally and bound by their Natures okay okay so recently as I've already described Scholars have begun to warn of the danger of such comparative projects such productive projects uh when we work in such productive ways naively with categories in a comparative project such as this we tend to use categories monotheism dualism and other isms religion also as well well with uh in a manner in which we have little stable ground to stand on except for our own inculturated identities and our own inculturated foundation and in this situation we tend to use our own Notions of religion as a lens when we approach the text Tal Assad is one of the more important critics of religion religious studies today and he's pointed this out repeatedly he's uncovered the gree to which and argued the degree to which our own Protestant worldview carves out and pre-selects evidence aligned to our own worldview most dangerous of all a reductive view of a religion that approaches the protestan ising Christianity can often be at the foreground of these comparative projects that are comparing world religions even when reading Christianity alone we have to be aware of such dangers for example in Reading earliest Christianity alone we create often a new testament document that Cleaves tightly to the outlines of Our Own and thus our own worldview and thus overlooks neglects or actively cuts out parts of parts that endanger that view so for example if one is looking through the lens of a post Reformation Jesus uh Jesus that's created by our own worldview without contemplating or trying to consider the idea of the New Testament text in the first century quite frequently a Jesus emerges from the pages of the New Testament that appears close to uh a Jesus that is familiar to one usually someone a Jesus dealing with social welfare Jesus dealing with the poor a Jesus is a teacher and more likely than not other images will fade from view so frequently when I teach the New Testament for for instance I can't tell you how many times I've taught that class where when I mention one of the most prominent views of Jesus in the New Testament is Jesus as an exorcist I get looks of shock from students in class even though in the gospel of Mark in chapters 1 and 2 he's this is the earliest gospel in the New Testament he's introduced this way and uh in fact throughout Mark that is the primary role for Jesus students are still shocked when when he's described in this manner what's particularly interesting uh in terms of how the world is changing today I started teaching about 10 years ago and that jaw that jaw-dropping degree was very low to the ground when I first mentioned that Jesus was an exorcist Jaws dropped to the ground in the past 10 years Jaws are not dropping so far to the ground today and I think that has a lot to do with shifts in popular culture the idea of Magic the idea of the Demonic the idea of vampires the idea of werewolves the idea of zombies are so much a part of our culture today that they were not 10 years ago that this notion is becoming less shocking today than it would have been 10 years ago so the way that students are inculturated in their worldview is affecting the way that they're approaching certain texts and reading them to give a bit of a sense of what I'm trying to get at here okay and I apologize for how enslaved I am to this text very I'm completely inculturated by this text okay so the same applies here it's not so easy to it's it's so easy to find our Christian devil in the Zoran zarrian anger Manu one of the greatest offenses here is not only reducing angru but removing this figure from the flow of the soop politically and culturally context contextualized passage of history and so many of these comparative World histories do that and to go so far to say that they're enacting uh enacting a uh an act of violence on the original uh text the rasan text uh I I do not think it's an exaggeration and to the same extent could be said for the the original uh second temple text the Hebrew Bible text as well as the new the New Testament and early Christian texts the same thing is happening when you when one is engaged in the practice of of world uh world religion comparison and yet while I'm making these warnings and I'm not making them in a dire way I'm not running out of the room screaming but while I'm making these warnings about how we handle these texts I don't propose severing a comparative connection altogether I don't propose keeping these texts in any sort of uh vacuum and sealed off one another because they were not in the ancient world we know that uh from the talk that we just had this wonderful informative talk with fantastic images that I do not have except now because I'm being a videotaped that we have a religion that ex that existed for centuries that ex existed definitely long into the Christian era and moved around and we have a religion Christianity that also moved around so we have we have certainly connections here and overlap and we certainly have points of contact that we should take into consideration and one of the main points of contact that we know of from uh from some of the images we've already seen today have to do with the Babylonian Exile in the in the 6th Century BCE so what do those points of contact mean rather than choosing the wide carelessly and to a certain extent arrogantly drawn path which ultimately locates a western modern devil and a Timeless non-contextualized ancient dualism of Zoroastrianism let's consider a more modern path and let's ask is it possible to comp compare certain elements certain aspects within zor asterism and it its demonology the LIE this concept of the lie for instance to elements within Christianity and it's demonology and within demonology we do have Christianity we do have this concept of the devil and demons and their main their main primary goal is liy and deception this is something that pushes that drives a particular element with the demonology from this very beginning with Paul all the way through to the late antique period so this is a question that I bring more to our esteemed guests because I'm not an expert in zor asterism which I've made all very clear in the first part of my talk uh and I definitely would love to have input here in terms of connections that can possibly be drawn what I would like to do in the the next portion of my talk is then to talk about demonology in Judaism ancient Judaism and in Christianity around these Concepts and to see if uh if we can find some common gram so I'm remind you as the lie or as deception this particular piece in Zoroastrianism with looking at this figure as the evil spirit or as deception finds parallels in second temple literature specifically second temple literature uh and early Christian literature and when I Define second temple literature here I'm not going to be dealing at all with the Hebrew Bible the Hebrew scriptures are fairly free of the Demonic it's second temple literature that is running Rife with it second type of literature for those who are not familiar it's also known as it's been termed inter testamental literature is a literature that uh came about at the time of the Babylonian exile and and dat from that point mid 6th Century BCE through 2 70 CE it is a literature that arose much of it in reaction to the Hebrew Bible much of it in reaction to the Torah much of it is written in reaction to questions that people had about certain gaps certain large puzzles that arose in the Hebrew Bible so for instance a wonderful question one of the best questions that arises is uh in Genesis 6 we have simple simple gaps that uh just just small skipping periods in time and figures we have a discussion of God basically noting that there are certain figures well first we have a long series of genealogies and and Genesis 5 and anybody who's read the Hebrew Bible is very aware of these genealogies and we move on to Genesis 6 where we have the mention of the the Watchers or also known as mentioned as the the the sons of God in some text and the sons of men in another depending on the translation and they are watching the daughters of man and from that moment they come down and join with the daughters of man and from that in some texts it's described as Giants and others was described as Nephilim some figure comes from this the text itself is very very conflated it's confusing after these actions take place we have a brief line in Genesis 6 which describes God was angry flood begins and then we have issues with Noah mixed in so what happens from this very conflated confused portion of the text to suddenly we're discussing things with Noah and we have the flood happening who are the Nephilim who are the daughters of man who are these who are these Heavenly characters possibly are these superhumans who are these individuals who are interested in the daughters of man what has happened what has taken place an entire literature was born based on that chapter in Genesis 6 enoic literature books uh enoic 1 2 and 3 which became popular in Judaism certainly during the second temple period but were much more popular in early Christianity and one of those books describes exactly what's taking place in that time period that these particular individuals that are watching these Daughters of man are are known as the Watchers and they're described as basically eventually fallen angels in that text an anic text they describ that way in another text in the second temple period uh The Testament of the 12 Patriarchs another text also jubilees jubilees is also known in scholarship as little Genesis for the fact that it does take many of these questions where you have these lapses in the Genesis text and an tries to answer them so these possibly Angelic characters who seem to have a lust for according to the second temple text develop a lust for these Daughters of man and go after these Daughters of man mate with these Daughters of men and what happens after this point well we still have to account for the anger of God so what takes place place in the second temple literature to describe it these Watchers then teach the daughters of man all sorts of things they teach them law okay that's not such a bad thing they teach them also how to make herbs okay herbs can be a good thing can flavor your food they teach them how to make makeup now we're getting to Shady character they teach them how to do magic now we're definitely into definitely definitely Dangerous Ground so we start to see a fall and a decline in terms of the activities that these Watchers teach the daughters of man and now we have reasons why God of the Hebrew Bible Yahweh would become extremely angry why some of these individuals who at one point were Heavenly Creatures would find these women alluring enough to come down mate with them and teach them all this stuff all this information all this information so the the daughters of man propagate this character this figure the Nephilim these characters this figures the largest of this Grand men that were on the Earth or the Giants are described as demons that propagate on the earth and we have many names for these demons so this is an example of what second temple literature does basically from that one moment in the text in in in uh Genesis 6 we have a whole discussion and elaboration that gives birth to a demonology and that demonology becomes extremely important to Christianity extremely important to Christianity okay so that is with uh Genesis 6 is one example here but we have many types of aspects of the demonology that are developed the one aspect that I want to deal with though really does does uh align to this notion of the devil how is the devil shaped or how is more importantly one individual character among these demonic figures shaped the Demonic figure is this one figure one that stands out comes in many characters many names in the text of the the and there are four texts basically where you find this figure there is The Testament of the 12 Patriarchs which is a a text 12 text basically each one that is uh a testament to one of the patri it's it's relatively straightforward in terms of how that's titled there's jubilees there's the anoa collection and then also the Dead Sea Scrolls which has uh a startling uh dualism in which we have the solders and solders daughters and sons of Light and the versus the daughters and sons of darkness and each of those have with them spirits of light and spirits of Darkness either inhabiting them or guiding them okay so in terms of figures of recognizable leading figures of uh that that are associated with the the Demonic or some figure that turns away from God it's described as Bal in The Testament of the 12 Patriarchs he's described as masima in Jubilee uh in different different names he comes by different names but many of the descriptions are the same he also has many uh this figure has many descriptions in terms of how he narratives of his fall one describes this figures uh the devil's fall or mimus fall or Bilo's fall due to his arrogance and pride he decides to raise himself up to God's level another narrative describes this figures jealousy when he is asked to lower himself and worship Mankind and as a result of this jealousy he turns away and takes a large group of angels with him and eventually as they turn they are described as evil spirits or evil angels in both instances this figure this leading figure takes many Fallen Angels always many fallen angels and is the figure that is above all of them and as each story moves from jubilees or the TW Testaments or into Christian literature this figure which eventually is known as Satan devil uh uh or dragon what's very important that something it's carried from the second temple literature into the Christian literature is that free will is emphasized it was a free will on the part of the figure of Bal or masima or Satan is also one of the terms that's used it was free choice on the part of these figures choose to choose to move away from the God and in that regard it was free choice of those angels to move with him and this is something that becomes a focal point in the Christian text as well so we have a quite colorful quote in jubilees for instance that describes the prince uh here the the prince of evil sent forth over other Spirits those which were under his hand do all manner of wrong once they have all decided to move away from Yahweh they decide to do all manner of wrong and sin and all manner of transgression to corrupt and Destroy and to shed blood upon the Earth this text goes on further to describe in what way they use deception Against Humanity and the text is full of reference to evil spirits who seduce men into evil acts to basically deceive men into evil acts for instance the The Testament of the 12 Patriarchs adds and describes in many ways in which Bellar and his evil spirits bring down man off the path of God descri describing a spirit of fornication a spirit of Envy a spirit of strife a spirit of hubris a spirit of magic a spirit of makeup anded and it goes on a ly of spirits detail all the impulses within human desire according to the Testament of Ruben for example there are no less than seven spirits of desp Deceit that are Appo appointed to man to uh to ensure that he'll turn away from God uh but don't despair because at this point also we have answers in terms of what a human being can do to act against these Spirits what we've seen so far in many of these texts is how div Spirits Fall Away From God how Angels Fall Away From God in their transformation what we haven't seen is Spirits once these humans Then Fall if there's anything that they can do in return how can a person push back against the Demonic in one's life what kind of agency does a human being have fear the lord love your neighbor and even through the spirits of Bellar claim even though they claim to afflict you with every evil yet shall they not have dominion over you for if he fears if he that fears God and loves his neighbor cannot be Smitten by the spirit of Bellar being Shield shielded by the fear of God then he should go forth and fight as as much as he can and it goes fur on further at the end for if a man flees to the Lord the evil spirit runs away from him so there is what's described here is agency and this is something that I want to follow within the Jewish text and the Christian text it's not just a matter of characterization of the Demonic in terms of what the LIE what deception is described how it might be characterized but also what kind of agency not just what kind of characterization but what kind of agency in other in other terms what kind of action or what kind of potential ritual practice can be given or advised to human beings who are the victims of the demonic so we pause to a minute for a minute to consider that very question how does one actively fear the lord in an age potentially without a temple and the second temple that was the state of situation for some time and not all those within uh within uh Judaism were close enough to the temple to be able to to partake many stayed uh in the Babylonian region so how does one accomplish this feat especially in a world that is increasingly being filled with spirits of every possible impulse toward toward evil does one accomplish this through prayer does one accomplish this through specific ritual actions meditation does one accomplish this through study of scripture what texts might give us indication of this how do these texts possibly compare to Christian texts are there texts within zor asianism that also give indication of what might happen in a human being's reaction against angru what is clear and what is painfully clear within the uh text of jubilees and in uh The Testament of the 12 Patriarchs especially and uh even more so as I'll mention in a moment what's very clear in the uh any of the texts that you pick up for the Dead Sea Scrolls is that a person must do something it's not just a matter of acknowledging that these Spirits exist and yes my gosh an angel of God has moved away from Yahweh and has decided to move in a different direction and taken a goggle or a gaggle a goggle is goggle is not the right word gaggle of of angels with him and they have turned and now they cluster around an individual and we shall take this with an apathetic grin the idea is that one does have to act and these descriptions in these texts which compound evil spirit upon evil spirit upon evil spirit almost are intended to render the reader into an act a performative act the text of the 12 patriarch speaks of a day when God shall finally release both kinds of spirits both a spirit of righteousness and a spirit of uh of of evil but until that point these two spirits will battle over uh free choice in the hearts of man and when he when a person eventually does open the gates when God eventually does open the gates of paradise he will make sure to bind Bellar and give power to men to tread upon evil spirits and again the question emerges what kind of action does a human being have available to him at this point what does it mean to tread upon the evil spirit now this is a phrase We also see in the New Testament what does it mean in that text as well is another question that Scholars have have have uh queried the Dead Sea Scrolls which are comparable to the Testaments and jubilees and dating also place the same emphasis on morality and the same emphasis the same uh the same impulse toward action in the rule of the community also known as the manual of discipline the teaching of the two Spirits document uh is found in many of The Kuman materials it's repeated throughout the Kuman materials in many copies so this is a small small excerpt from that text from the god of knowledge comes all that is and shall be and from he allotted uh and he God allotted unto man two spirits that he should walk in them until the time of his visitation they are the spirits of Truth and perversity dominion over all of the sons of righteousness is in the hand of the prince of light all dominion over the sons of pervers is in the hand of the Angel of Darkness and these are the ways of the spirits in this world it is of the spirit of Truth to Enlighten the heart of man and then follows a list of comparable comparable good spirits which I'm not going to uh bore you with but to the spirit of perversity belongs cupidity slackness in the service of righteousness impiety and falsehood pride and hotess falsity and deceit cruelty and abundant wickedness and in his wisdom God has set an end for the existence of perversity and at the time of the visitation he will destroy it forever till now the spirits of Truth and perversity battle in the hearts of every man they walk in wisdom or Folly the cultural overlap between second temple literature and early Christianity is fairly easy to understand early Christianity by some measures was simply Judaism and within early Christianity there are many demonologists that we may discover many demonologist that we may discover for example I could speak about Christian apologetics ability to demonize and diabolize surrounding religions uh especially polytheism I could speak about uh how Jesus displayed prominently as an exorcist and therefore for the idea of demonic disease and exorcistic healing and how they were a vital strain within Christianity from the earliest decades through to today and we're seeing a rise of that today especially in charismatic christianities U that have been on the rise the past 30 years but are making uh themselves very well known today uh and for today's lecture though uh I'm I'm I'm adhering narrowly to one line of demonology this idea that is very very wide path though of the devil as The Great Deceiver the devil as the great liar okay this was a deeper systemic demonology and it began almost immediately within Christianity and some could argue that it grew directly out of simple second temple uh literature that it was almost wholly adopted out of second temple literature in Romans while we don't have much in terms of the New Testament what we do have in Romans in 1: 18-32 is a very interesting passage that determines a lot of the material we see over the next six centuries and Beyond this is a passage in which God is basically blaming Humanity for turning away from the truth within that that God has given him and that God has given humanity and that truth is that he is the only God he is the main god they have turned away from that truth that righteousness to choose a path ofstead instead of unrighteousness a path of darkness and because of the fact that they chose through their free will to turn away from the truth and this is something that is repeated throughout this passage God has decided to turn them over and the Greek word is paradom which means to surrender or to abandon to turn them over to Darkness turn them over to lust to emotion so basically what happens to human beings because they decide to turn away they themselves lose their ability to control themselves to have rationality to have any sense of R rational control over their over their body Mind Body Duality that we see within platonism has reversed itself and what is described after that are all the types of all the types of uh vices that then take over human beings from that moment on The Vices of Deceit being one of the prominent ones the vice of the first one mentioned of course is the vice of sexuality but right after that is the vice of Deceit the vice of hypocrisy the vice of lying to your parents deceiving your parents so the idea of Deceit is eventually then becomes basically part of the DNA of humanity in this particular text so one of the most prominent texts within Christianity in Romans describes this idea of human beings because of their Free Will and a sense becoming the Demonic themselves now what we have here that text also that becomes programmatic for describing demons in other other texts John chrism in the 4th century is one of them we also have in the devil and how he's described as the The Great Deceiver it becomes very important in Genesis 3 a text describing the devil as the serpent as The Great Deceiver in terms of deceiving Eve how it's described specifically though by Christian theologians extremely early in the second third fourth century is that Eve then deceives it's very prominent described as Eve is deceiving Adam and through doing that this idea of deception passes to humanity Humanity breaks humanity is broken and what emerges is a human being a Humanity that can only lie that can only enact through deception and this comes from the original act in Genesis 3 the devil described as the serpent described as The Great Deceiver so this idea of the Demonic as the devil and demons as The Great Deceiver is something that we see very very early and all such choices whether it's the Demonic the devil or human beings are about Free Will origin in the third Century theologian one of the more uh prom theologians uh in Alexandria is insistent on this point regarding this issue the connection between deceit and Free Will the devil freely chose to move away from God and so too he could reverse that decision human beings when uh being tempted by the devil are tempted through deceit as well this is something else that origin origin emphasizes this is something we see also in St Augustus this idea of Free Will around the idea of the Demonic the devil is an apostate angle angel and can only go to this can only go to this length than he did at the beginning to deceive at the beginning to deceive and leave astray the mind of man into disobeying the Commandments of God and gradually to darken their hearts okay so whether it's the devil Satan or Dragon what have you can see uh the idea of Deceit is clear in fact the theme of The Devils and the demons deceptiveness occurs continually and particularly associated with leading their followers into sin but this is all that devils and demons can do within Christianity as well they can only deceive and this is an important Point ofh help throughout most of the literature there's maintenance of Free Will for all human beings and the devil and demons do not force humans to sin or Force humans to choose to sin as the as is made clear in a text final text that I want to talk about for just a few minutes in the 1 to 2 Century a text called the uh Shepherd of Hermos pushes these principles of Free Will and pushes also the principles of the uh two two ways uh the two paths uh of document the notion of free will uh following this Spirit of evil or following the spirit of goodness this is something we've seen in the Desy Scrolls we've seen it in the uh The Testament the 12 Patriarchs and now we see it in this text as well in the 4th Century we have a manuscript the Codex uh cicus and the this text happened to be part of listed as part of the New Testament as well well so we see here it's included as scripture in this in this uh text okay I am going to shorten this too so to make sure that you have time this before the audience completely leaves basically what I'm trying to do here is to just give a flavor of how the Demonic and the devil exists in Judaism and Christianity to give us a chance to see if there's any Common Ground possibilities of comparing this with the idea of what existed from the 1 Century through to the 6th or throughout in zarrian ISM uh the main points within Judaism and Christianity though were all of these texts push the notion of not just the idea of the lie and deception which talk about victimization all of these texts also create the notion of human agency how one reacts against the Demonic or the devil as lie and if there's a point in which there can we can talk about a comparison or create a comparative project on the idea of ritual I'd be very very interested to begin that conversation if it's at all possible and if I haven't completely destroyed any possibility of doing so by droning on and on about Devils so to our final [Applause] talk thank you Dana okay well I'm going to introduce our last speaker of of the afternoon and that's Taj der uh he has his PhD from UCLA and another of our sister institutions um and he focused there on the periods of late Antiquity in the Middle Ages which of course correspond to the sesanian period of Iranian uh history and he also focused on indoor Iranian languages and culture uh Professor darus now occupies the Howard basker Baskerville chair in Ian history and Persian and the persianate world at UC Irvine and is also associate director there and acting chair of the Samuel M Jordan Center for Persian studies and culture uh Professor Derry is active internationally on a number of editorial boards for scholarly journals in his field of Iranian studies but he has also been extraordinary prolific as an author of both books and articles written both in English and in farsy most recently he has brought out Iranian kingship the Arab conquest and zoroastrian apocalypse uh which was a publication of the governor Fellowship lectures which he delivered at the KR Kama inst Oriental Institute in Mumbai and also recently 2009 cenan Persia the rise and fall of an Empire which was winner of the British Society for Middle East studies award um there's too many books in articles to list um and um I think that I'll just proceed now at this point even though it would be easy to go on at much greater length uh as for our two other speakers as well uh but I'll hope you take again my brevity as recognition that you'd rather listen to uh to Professor Derry than to me so please join me in welcoming Professor Taj Derry to UCSD to speak to us on the topic of zoroastrian sacred history from Alexander to Islam ladies and gentlemen I do have some pictures and I shall try to be somewhat brief approximately at the time when Muhammad jar alabar the famous Muslim historian was compiling his T was compiling the C and along other zor asrian sages were redacting important pav texts thus the coming of the abet the Muslim uh Dynasty that comes to power in 750 uh the coming of the abases and establishment of Islam appears to have propelled many to write a history of the past according to their communal perspectives this of course had already begun during the late C Ian period for Zoroastrianism it seemed necessary to put to pen the events of the past so that the leaders of the community of the good religion vean would be able to pass down their memory uh to the future co-religionist in this new sacred historiographical report which is mainly contained and this is the one that Scholars deal with d book four uh in Middle Persian text of late Antiquity is the best known source and uh in this text the two most polarizing and devastating events is the coming of Alexander and that of the Arab Muslims one of course killed according to this uh dink four one killed the Magis and tore aunder the avesta and brought doubt and heterodoxy so much so that even with the coming of the cenans that uh was discussed by Professor Rose uh High priests such as kerer who we see right there uh and AD spandan later on and then V shaur had to go through ordeals and make Journeys to heaven and hell and to meet deities to establish an Orthodoxy and I've just put approximately during which monarch they were ruling cenan Monarch and who were they facing in the Roman world and what was going on relatively so that's just an approximation now uh the Arabs in turn invaded what the cenans called Iran sha the Empire of the Iranians uh and stayed there uh where they spread their religion and according to these middle Persian texts such as dinkar that they weakened and enfeebled the good religion certainly our authors believe that no Calamity compared uh to this had befallen Iran Shah and the zoroastrian religion it was now up to Idan the person who's last responsible for this redaction of the P texting C 4 and others to retrieve the sacred knowledge and commentary on the aesta to bring yet again the Lost Orthodoxy amidst the rampant heterodox movements if we follow Patricia crona's new book which I have put the cover right there uh called nativist prophet indeed there were many of these heterodox movements just to name five of these people sunbad Bak Al which I think this is a manuscript perhaps referring to the veiled one right here and ceased and a host of other mly prophets trans migrators of soul and time which had all sorts of zor asrian elements about them indeed if there was a time to put to pend the events of the past to protect the true history of the good religion it would be now amidst the religious chaos in the relative C of Bagdad the capital of the abbasids as uh uh Jean de manash a famous scholar of middle Persian has observed long ago as Islam was gaining ground and epics were being absorbed into Persian literature in a Muslim likee garb there was an anxiety to preserve what was important for Zoroastrianism uh they were just stripping all of these zor asrian lore and tradition and making it part of this new coming tradition thus in the 9th century a history or memory of the past was redacted in response to Islam at the moment that Islamic histories were appropriating the histories of the conquered people be it in in or ham M and others as I mentioned Who were strippings or asrian nature of this Persian had passed but this process of zor asrian History had begun in the cenan period certainly by the 6th Century of Common Era when a history was put into writing where now a literary along an already existing oral tradition side by side was telling the stories of the past which I think again Professor uh Rose mentioned about this orality for a long time uh being part of the Iranian World in this talk I intend to discuss the way the religious and mythical or historical tradition were used in order to construct a new uh history a new sacred history in late antique Iran 6 to 9th century initially I had made up my mind that I would say something about before the sixth Century of Common Era and the refashioning of the past now I think we can say very little in fact about the time before the fifth century of Common Era in terms of what the cenans historically believed or in what they inherited in terms of historical and religious knowledge in fact if we are honest one cannot say anything concretely about the historical memory of the Iranian people before the fifth or sixth Century of Common Era even someone like Arthur Christensen whose hyz Tendencies is well known stated that the vague idea that Persia had been in continual Warfare with the Greeks is perhaps the only remembrance which had remained from the Akim times in late Antiquity meaning that there wasn't much of a historical memory let us see what evidence is there for the Third thir Century with the establishment of the cenan Empire where there seems to have been a change in religious ideology even though our sources are late in this regard I think Professor uh dung's sober skepticism another scholar of zor arism raises important points which we take for granted I'd like to reiterate that Rahim shyan in his recent book has given the notion that in the early cenan inscriptions uh specifically shur the first so this is uh the shaur the first who uh fought several Roman emperors and was quite successful there's an inscription here and one right across it which is called his res geste uh in this inscription uh what we find at naram is that shaur the King of Kings could not recount more than three generation of ancestors before him only three that's all he could ardashir Bak Anan he cannot go further back to recall anybody as his ancestors so his ainan in Middle Persia meaning ancestors beside this point cannot be established while by the time of later late antique texts such as the Zoran book of BND we have a detailed genology which had been constructed to give legitimacy to the cus in these 7th 8th 99th Century text they go all the way back to the Kean Kings they go to back to zoraster the famous sages in the aesta so it took about I think four or five centuries to actually create a very detailed pass adir bakan who is the founder that is arir the first the founder of the sesanian Empire uh in a middle Persian text called kir bakan The Book of the Deeds of ardashir the son of Bak there he connects himself to a which is probably dasas II the last aimet king uh and then uh he also there's a mention that he was from the na this is a middle Persian thing from the lineage or Sean of King dasas III what what we should be mindful that these texts are between the 6th and the 9th century of Common Era these are not from the time of ardashir in the 3 Century a much later tradition furthermore if we uh try to find any other scattered evidence from the early cenan period we would have to deal with this tantalizing find of a manquin Papi which was published uh which uh discusses mani's life the important uh Prophet uh in late Antiquity uh which says when I was 24 years old in the year in which Dar the King of Persia subjugated the city of hatra and in which sapores that is shaur he assumed the mighty diam here it's been suggested that this Dar is in fact ardashir the founder who's also been connected to daras but again this pying is now shown to also be a fifth century work that means there is nothing before this to in terms of being in time with ardashir to making such connections even reports of uh Roman historians be it uh herodian dios or amanus marcelos uh provide a genealogy or some sort of genealogy for the cenans but I think more recent studies starting with ziv Ruben uh the late professor at the University of Jerusalem has shown especially for herodian what we're seeing is in fact its Roman perspective on this Persian past than the reality of what the cenans were attempting actually to describe as who their ancestors were it is in the late 4th century and through the actions of this gentleman shaur II the cenan king that changes began to develop in cenan view of themselves and probably the past shaur II by 350 had turned his attention to the east so it's not Rome but the kushans or the land to the east uh if we are to accept Chronicle of arella an important syc uh text and he defeated his foes and established cenan dominion over the kushans two middle Persian inscriptions describes this boundary of the cenans which goes all the way uh to the East and includes the cusan so all the way up to north um uh India and finally we have gold coins minted by shopour II from mins uh in M which Professor uh um Rose was talking about in Central Asia uh where the kusan also minted gold coins we also have large Copper coinage from sistan and Kabul modern day Afghanistan by Shakur the so we knew he was present and it's the first time we find actually San presence there as such it is during shaur II's rule that with regard to Zoroastrianism The Towering figure of the 4th Century namely this man's name isand the important priest is credited with some sort of codification of the aesta and the weeding out of heresy again Book fourth of the dinat which I mentioned in the beginning and here's a coinage of shaur right there the text reads shaur King of Kings son of hormas induced all countrymen to orient themselves to God by disputation and put forth all oral traditions for consideration and examination after the Triumph of this priest adur through his declaration put to trial by ordeal with all those sectaries and Heretics who recognized or studied the nas this is parts of the aesta he made the following statement this is probably from aurad According to this late antique middle Persian text now that we have gained an insight into religion in the worldly existence we shall not tolerate anyone of false religion and shall be more zealous okay okay thus it appears that there was a great Council or a senate this I know I'm using Christian terminology here but it's so just fascinating it's about the same time that are things happening with Christianity we're getting I think similar ideas with zor asterism in the east in which all people middle Persian kisharon probably meaning zor asrian theologians discussed the zor asrian material available it is clear that there were differences of opinion still because we were supplied with the host of terms for different zor asrian sects jist those of different groups jardon and those who studied the nask this means bundles or sections of the aesta nask that is to study the nask of the aesta in the apocalyptic literature shaur II is fondly remembered as one who arranged the world in terms of Law and religion uh in Middle Persian we have doid arranged religion or law and made salvation current among the creatures of the world and aurad his priest is remembered as the restorer of the religion r v against the Heretics shaur II with the aid of his priest aad attempted to bring about order and doctrinal unity in zor asrian religion this sounds ex almost like Constantine to me in some way at least from later Traditions no doubt the threat of Christian Christianity which was just discussed by uh Professor Keras in some ways induced the king not to actually only persecute the Christian but also create a strong zor asrian structure for his co-religionists so in the 4th Century by the end of it I could say or I would suggest several important things had happened one one can suggest that the cenans became familiar with the world of Eastern Iran where the of course is an important sort of part of that which again Professor um Rose has talked about two zor asrian began to have some sort of organization which was in reaction I think and in conjunction with Christianity as it's gaining foothold in the west and becoming institutionalized and by the way Constantine saying I am the ruler of all Christians and also Judaism as it's also writing they're writing the Sages are writing the talut and so as all of I think all of these Traditions are developing at the same time they try trying to create similar Frameworks and finally this is my pet peeve idea as to when Persian took hold in Central Asia or greater horasan and I was suggest it is by the coming of shaur II in the 4th Century where Persian began to become the lingua franka in Central Asia that doesn't mean that uh San horian and uh ban was not uh the languages of the day but this is the beginning I think of the influence of Persian in the region by the fifth century and suddenly now I think as a result of this Encounter of shaur with the East uh it resulted uh in the adoption of names and titler uh by zor asrian Kings by cenan zor asrian Kings suddenly Now we move away from the names of arir and shaur and in terms of onomastics that may may not be it is somewhat zor asrian but now we get a set of names which include cavad K these are names of important konet uh sort of mythical rulers uh of the distant past in the aesta we find tier ROM Shah one who brings um calm to the Empire another title of these Kean Kings or k titles and the name of a cenan rule called kro an important figure in the especially in the Yash uh the inclusion of the term Or Glory or Fortuna if you want to use that or Fortune is further indication of the cenan's preoccupation with this avestan past so we don't find this in the third Century we begin to see something in the fourth it's in the fifth century that we begin to have all of this suddenly coming in something must have happened and so I would say that something has changed ideologically in terms of the Orient ation of the cenans uh from perhaps the West to the east talking about the aesta itself and its dating is a daunting task which I dare not say anything about but uh my friend and colleague Johan viina uh who's a good Pary uh never lets me forget that the oldest extent of veston manuscript is from The 14th Century okay the oldest ofest manuscript that we have is from the 14th century and Jean Kellin perhaps one of the most important avestan Scholars a philologists in his recent article on the Akim and the aesta uh states that even the term itself and anything such as a book that is the aesta is from the cenan period that is the aesta as we know it in its current form is the creation of a late antique mindset of the zorri cenan Priestly tradition but if we also take the idea the avestan alphabet was invented in the 4th Century that I think has been shown clearly in the 4th Century of Common Era exactly when we have of course the reign of shaur who's also sitting here on his throne then there was a good moment to have an avestan book coming to being in the fifth and the 6th century and why the Christians are doing it t is being redacted right in the cenan Empire The Mannequin are doing this quite well and they are dangerous suor asrian and so nowo aans are doing the same thing I think by the 6th century when kro the first this is the greatest of the cenan rulers ordered a book called thead Nam the book of Lords to be written the oral tradition was partly put down for posterity as the history of Iran's past this past had as as it appears from thead namag inspired sources dimension of tradition in the East captured beautifully in the aesta uh again Jean Kellin has made a very important observations on the aesta specifically uh when it deals with historical matters pertaining to these Aras or Iranians I as a historian of Lake an like to read the Yash in fact as a historical material where you could exactly see what is unfolding uh its mere image in cenan history and so it's also significant that the when that the aesta was being put in its final form in the sesanian period very close to the time that the National History of the Iranians this huad Nam was of course uh being put to writing so it is no surprise that thead n Act is book of Lords is heavily influenced by avestan tradition geographically and historically what is important to note is that this G this geographical Horizon and kings and heroes of the past began to be associated with the Iranian plateau and its late antique kings that is the cenans one can even go further and state that many of the cenan Kings acted and conducted themselves according to the customs of the ancient Kings potentates of the avestan Yash in a sense they were playing a part in the narrative epic of the past and so here we're seeing again a picture from the air of ton which Professor um Rose showed and of course if you read middle Persian text this has been here since immemorial time or all the way back where zoraster is born this is the transposition of Eastern sort of sacred topographical ideas of religion on onto the Iranian plate and Professor kppa has recently written a wonderful I think article on the sacred fire temples and this connection and the movement of sacred top topography from the East to the West in the Iranian world but not only they do that they're transposing uh Eastern koned ideas of history of the past which was cured in the Vesta onto this Iranian Plateau as well they're doing the same thing this ancestral p is then connected with the tragic murder of dasas which we talked about earlier and the destruction of the zorran priests and the aesta by Alexander according to these late antique texts whatever and wherever this memory came from and it could be perhaps genuine Priestly tra tradition which in turn also preserved D or doas the coming of Alexander is an important point in the great break from the past then the Aras make a brief appearance of valash in this D book four collected the sacred narratives and we have a short list of Aras name where by the time of the Shah Nam this is the redaction of thead into Persian in the 10th century and oral tradition where for the arets feri the composer of the Shan has his famous four lines uh since their genealogy and lineage was short meaning they are saucet no worldly person can retell their history from them I have heard nothing but their names nor have I seen anything in the book of Kings one could argue that it may be that the arits who were aware of the aimet what is interesting is the change in araza Imperial ideology which was which pushed the Phil Helens to gravitates towards Iranian uh Traditions specifically those of the Aimes and I think Professor Rose also touched upon that but this connection even if known by the cenans would have brought little interest in their preservation of national tradition in zor asrian memory the arusd were never rehabilitated in a unique and interesting middle Persian text which is part of this manuscript mu 29 which unfortunately hasn't had an English translation or anything in Western language uh the memory of oret captured as such and uh this is a description of the different ages according to the zor asan worldview where there's a tree with different branches and the third the Brazen branch which uzor Aster saw so overas is telling or ramaza telling zoraster is the ruer rulership of the arits is Manifest where they conducted themselves sinfully and ruled iron Shar in the manner of Alexander of evil lineage and they will destroy the good religion ouch this clear indictment of the arasa however a late pavi text may be suggests a disdain for this dynasty which ruled the Iranian Plateau for almost four and a half centuries as was again mentioned before and probably by Alexander soluset are probably meant in this tradition as well so for a long time almost six centuries uh just to conclude I would say that by the late cenan period and it's by then only a sacred history was refashioned which reused the ancient monuments of the Iranian Plateau with the avestan type tradition from Eastern Iran coordinating and moving sacred history and locations from the East to the Iranian plateau in this way Zoroastrianism and zoroastrians refashioned Iran's textural and topographic iCal history this history was temporally removed from what the Judo Christian tradition knew and what the Greco Romans had remembered um uh of the past thank [Applause] [Music] you so I think all three of us our speakers are ready to entertain questions and they might like to retire to these comfortable chairs and bottles of water very has anybody got any questions yes I was wondering if there any connection found between C it seems like the Cs are very similar ritual and customs they now profess to be Muslims but is there any discuss yes there's a lot of current discussion between the two did you all hear the question about the connection between the Kurds and the zoroastrians uh I have a couple of uh acquaintances who claim that they descendant uh from the mes who seem to have disappeared completely um and that the mes were the oldest fire worshippers fire not fire worshippers but but those who pay reverence to Fire and therefore that they're the oldest zoroastrians um but that's in kind of common discussion there's no evidence I think um although some people say that there are aspects of the Kurdish language that may have remnants of an anent median um I don't know whether that answers your question but um thank you you want to add to that no I think this is part of uh the new Kurdish nationalistic Narrative of of course all nationalistic uh narratives need to make connections to the Past Kurds are an ancient people their language certainly is an Iranian language which is connected to avestan and hence so the new Kurdish nationalism also picks on vestern terminology and Kurdish terminology which of course being a related language you know is the same in terms of it structure and uh you know some of its uh forms and say aha here's the connection absolutely it's you know Iranian but not exactly a vestan okay that's all I want to ask pre-islam let's say were the fall followers of prophet zra really known as Z zorran or zus or they never considered themselves as a zus except saying that we are mazas when did this term Zan come up because many people feel that that it has an identity which has existed since day one but this term probably is a recent thing because even when pares go to India they call themselves as pares Persians so this term Zoran identity when did it come up in history joury well in the younger vestern text the The Credo the statement of faith that you find in the Fran you have um this profession that I um I declare myself a Mazda worshipper and the phrase is zarish which means it's sometimes translated as a zoroastrian but it means one you could say it means one who is like z zarathustra um so you could argue that the the term goes way back to the younger Vesta but the actual naming of the religion as a zoroastrian religion doesn't come until the late 19th century I think the first example that we have in it in its English form is in one of the dictionary entries in the late 19th century so it's it's a the concept of Zoroastrianism is a late 19th century construct but the idea that an adherent of the religion is like zarathustra is a very very early concept but but the the the notion of that one is a Mazda worshipper then one has to ask does that mean the same thing at every period of the history of the evolution of the religion and is it the same as being a zoroastrian and these are questions that we still continue to debate and Scholars some Scholars say well you can only be a zoroastrian WR at the very early period of the of the tradition at the time when zarus is is alleged to have composed the The Goth and others say well that's Mazda worship and that Zoroastrianism only comes into as as as a definable Orthodox religion if you can use that term only comes into being in the late cenan period or even not until the 9th century when the the the there there seems to be a more Systematic Theology and cosmology that develops so it's a you know wa you have to make your own decision then Hinduism stay as Hinduism it did not become after any one Prophet or any one person like Judaism is not Mo Moses ISM you know so this trend of Maas religion becoming a more like a zuran religion it's much later as you say and and why would it come up in a religion which almost vanish from the earth like other religions are still big in number cast and all of a sudden let's say 19th century people oh Zionism why would it happen like people are not sure about their Identity or I I think there's also an an onslaught it's it's it's like these these waves in history when you have um a a particularly forceful other religion that arises that that causes um you know say like Constantine and and the the kind of Roman and Byzantine Onslaught on CIA and Iran had a huge impact on the on the way that the sasanians saw themselves in their own religious Traditions so in in 19th century India you have the arrival of Christian missionaries which is when you have the the beginning of the iconography that relates to zarathustra you don't have that before that period either so it's this sense well we need a we need you know John Wilson writes his his book challenging the the person of zoroaster in the you know he arrives in 1829 and he's writing in the 1830s and 1840s and he says you don't have you know there's no evidence that that zarathustra ever performed any Miracle so suddenly you have this this challenge you have to create this this being that is that is like Christ and and so that's a h huge impetus it seems to me to to shift the focus what I would just had I mean this is part of the 19th century or 18th century tradition of in the west I mean uh Islam was known as muhammadanism so this isms of sort of identify with the profit of that religion as something that was more common I guess in the west uh this wasn't something that the followers were necessarily saying but rather the way they were being ID identified in Western scholarship you know Jenny in your speech you had mentioned that what was found at pasag Gard as far as stands on the fire alar makes us think that Cyrus the Great who was a great aminian king was a zorian are there any other evidences that lead historians to think that Cyrus in fact was as aashian because in the shame I I believe I mean I'm not an author I mean um I haven't read the whole sh but I believe there is no reference to the aunan dynasty you know in in the books book of Kings so can you throw some light on that well perhaps toride should talk about that you you want do you want to answer the second bit of that first why aren't they there or what about they're not there I'll answer the for this bit of you well he's not in the shame he's not in the book of the Kings there's two ideas either uh the Akim are grafted into the K tradition as one suggestion is and so uh they're forgotten in that way or utterly they were just forgotten or removed from this sacred Narrative of history but they're not there so the second part is yes I think the problem is that we don't have any texts in IND indigenous Iranian texts from the time of Cyrus that say anything about him um in terms of his own personal beliefs we have the well unless you take the the the writings in Old Acadian on the in the Babylonian CI form and the biblical text as being part of a wider Persian propaganda in that case you could say well he worships Muk and he worships the god of Israel The God Who is in Jerusalem but still there's no mention of aor Mazda um but the fact that there's this iconography at Pasar that indicates that the reverence was paid to the fire tells us that there's a motif there that then continues to be important throughout the the zoroastrian religion from then until the present day um I mean there are other some people look at the tomb the way that he's he's buried and say well it's was constructed so that he wouldn't pollute the elements so but there's no there's no proof that that he was a a asan unless I did write an article about uh about this I I it could be said that he in the in the shaame that he the typology of Cyrus as he's portrayed in the Babylonian and the biblical texts he's a he's a good shepherd he's described in the Greek texts and the biblical texts and in the the Cyrus cylinder as looking on after sheep and of course this is one of the epithets that's given to yima to jam Sheed so it could be that there was this kite this merging with the with the earlier rule of Jamshed and that that's how he gets lost in in the tradition and I think zenfon also has this very interesting story about Cyrus as he's coming out with the Chariot if that is Cyrus I mean Zenon claims of course is Sor there's a sacrificing a white horse and of course I don't know this is Zoran per se but it's kind of it's part of the Indo Iranian tradition of ashraa or sacrifice which is particular to Indo Iranian world so if he was doing asham MAA you know at least puts him in the Indo Iranian sort of cultural view rather than the anite elamite tradition but it's neither here nor there I think I I had a point that I wanted to make about mind you I I think to me the the key difference between the Jewish and Christian Traditions Ando asan Traditions is that my reading of the text is that from the GetGo aor Mazda and angran were completely separate whereas in the Jewish and the Christian tradition um the con relation relation connected is there when you say from the Geto when is that then since we're talking about endless time I mean the the aest term is is infinite time or endless time are there any texts in which there's a connection made between or a narrative that's imported and puts them together well as as the middle Persian text the Zoran text the BND which is about the cosmology the the the implication is that the world the physical world is created mhm so that this battle between good and evil can be engaged mhm but it's engaged mostly through human agency okay okay mostly through human agency so in terms of the text that's what's interesting about in terms of the characterization of those in terms of the characterization of her and and angu then you don't have the descriptions that that I was Finding and we were talking about the 19th century and early 20 Century characterizations of Zoroastrianism and and and how I'm I'm recovering all these late 1920 and 20th Century characterizations of Zoran asterism where you're getting a characterization of of those figures and also certain quotations that match up with those characterizations so in the actual text in the avesta you do not have those as personified figures in a way that you do in the Christian and the Jewish well text in the young aesta you have that's what I'm curious about evil the the Dr is mentioned the the this concept of the LIE yeah and the LIE becomes well the LIE becomes one form of the lies in the form of a fly that hovers around the dead body because anything that is like the it's explain there's there's a middle Persian text that um explains how good and evil cannot exist in the same space MH so anything that is living and is productive and is fruitful is the word is spenter in the Vester and it's often translated as holy MH um but it means kind of that which brings increment or increase is completely different from anything that is angra which is evil or destructive so in the in the in the choosing or in the division it it's it's either something that brings life or something that brings not life and anything that is not life is is of evil and and is unproductive got it and is and becomes a source of great pollution mhm mhm and in you know that that and so the fly that is connected to the is buzzing around just waiting for that dead stuff to materialize it's interesting yeah what's interesting is that spenta meaning the idea of the Holy even well it's holy as in this as in the German sense of H meaning whole and healthy whole and healthy I was reading it and the translation was often I kept encountering Holy Spirit Christian probably author transl that's the problem with a lot of the no that's what I'm saying I mean the problem with using 19th century texts is that they're often translated by Protestant the main question which is how uh the main point is that how damaging those texts are in trying to make a comparison there needs to be if there can be a new comparative model made between between uh between particularly between the avesta text directly what's happening in those texts with what's happening in the Christian text in a particular time period and and and and disengage from the comparative models from that time period because they are dangerous in terms of in terms of reducting and and in terms of christianizing but that's interesting what you're saying in terms of being very very separate because there are some hints of that and when you get into Christian theologizing in uh the monastic text I also want to mention another one of your second temple texts is the Book of Tobit yeah yeah and the Book of toit describes um a a demon in the hamadan area and the demon is named in the Greek version of the text as asmodus and he pops up again in some of the rinic texts and in the Zohar as ashmodai and that derives it seems to me directly from an aveston entity who is not actually mentioned in the avesta but the as as a composite being but is mentioned in two separate kind of constructs and one is that of AA yeah which is um this sense of wroth or Fury which is is inherent in anybody who follows the lie and daa which is this false god or evil entity so that in in the book of tobic they're kind of compounded together as aadaa which becomes ashad or Asos oh that's fantastic so that is I mean you could say that's a a zoroastrian demon who yeah enters into the that um scriptural quasi scriptural text in that second Temp and that's not the only time asmodus is in a great many of the of the Christian text he's mentioned in some of the hogra that'll show up and that that name will show up a great deal in Christian material that's interesting that's when you're trying to find these what what's the background of these names that's that's very interesting thank you for those question you know I'm just curious to know reading the aasta and the Gata one comes to a conclusion that Zionism also believes in Resurrection of the Soul after you know I mean similar to Christianity but there are many scholars who refer reincarnation into Zionism I mean what does your research show is there any mention as far as reincarnation is concerned in in zor aism okay this is tricky but I would say uh yes if you're in the 9th century living in horasan which probably have been influenced by Buddhist or Hindu ideas but I think in Zoras and proper that is not the case there's no reincarnation this is either more probably in India today maybe that there may be a connection because of the Indian uh connection or it would be in you know early medieval late Antiquity of people who are dealing with Buddhists and Hindu world in the East otherwise as as far as I know there's no reincarnation in Sor aronis Jenny would you like to no that's fine okay uh outside of the the pares of India and their existence in the diaspora and the zoroastrians in YZ in Iran uh are there any any other areas based on your travels and whatnot or your readings any any substantial numbers of practicing zor asrian outside of those two entities mean apart from Southern California yeah that that is that is a Pary diaspora is what what I'm talking about you know Australia and England and USA and whatnot I'm particularly referring to all the stuns yes I thought you might be there is a substantial or we know that the Zoro Asians as I said continue in dun hang in East in that Eastern end of the Silk Road until the 10th Century we also know that there was a sizable sogdian zoroastrian community in Shian until probably the middle of the 8th early 9th century um but we don't find any communities that last beyond those periods um we think that the kushans the early kushans who were Buddhists later they build the The Caves at baman we think that they were probably zoroastrians to start with but then they don't continue to be zoroastrians Central Asia is tricky Central Asia we know that in sogdiana proper that when the last king devage dies in seven early Decades of the 8th century um that the uh Arab Muslims come into the area and they butt up against the Chinese for quite a long time and we don't have any evidence for the continuation of the zoroastrian tradition in that region um although there are still a few people who speak an ancient version of soan which is an East Iranian dialect called yag noi I think there about two or three left in some obscure Valley um there there have been remnants as you asked the question about the Kurds there have been remnants of Hill peoples in the in the Pome that are said to have elements of the zoroastrian tradition still in their uh practices or even in their terminology um but the modern phenomenon of tajiks claiming to be Zoro aans and kazaks claiming to be Zoro asan is is a new is a new phenomenon I'm sorry we're out of time we out of time thank you thank you thank you thank you both so much for coming and doing this this was marvelous

Channel: UCSD Program for the Study of Religion

Views: 37,523

Keywords: religion, Zoroastrianism, UC San Diego, UCSD, Touraj Daryaee, Dayna Kalleres, Jenny Rose

Id: cCn1XJ3MIH8

Length: 155min 22sec (9322 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 01 2014