Welcome to Samarkand

On the coldest day of the year, one's thoughts turn, naturally enough, to Samarkand, where the temperature is a balmy 55 degrees. But maybe it's not all that natural. By coincidence, I was fully absorbed not so long ago in a book titled In Search of Zarathustra: the first prophet and the ideas that changed the world.

The author, Paul Kriwaczek, takes us with him on a journey of exploration across Europe and the Middle East to Central Asia, visiting a long list of mostly obscure ruins stretching from Hadrian's Wall to Samarkand and beyond, while refreshing our memory regarding not only Zoroastrianism but also Manichaeism, Mithraism, the Cathars, and the Parsees. Kriwaczek wears his erudition lightly and makes no attempt to convert us to one belief or another. He isn't much interested in belief at all, in fact, but rather in the cultural impact of a religion dating back, by some estimations, ten thousand years, doing his best to gather together the reins of a chariot that has long been run off the road in the mountains of Iran or a desert byway along the Silk Route, far from the bustling superhighways of the three Mosaic religions.

Prior to reading the book, I had the impression that Zoroastrianism was a dead or dying religion—the first monotheistic religion, perhaps, but also one that somehow worshipped fire. I took the Three Wise men to be Zoroastrians, and had a sneaking hunch that Nietzsche, almost at random, was inspired by its beliefs and traditions when he wrote Also Sprach Zarathustra.   

I read that thick book as an adolescent, and was overawed by its "profundity." I might not feel the same today, though some scholars do. I also bought an LP of Richard Strauss's tone poem of the same name, which figured so prominently in the then-popular film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Kriwaczek describes reading the book at the same age, and to similar effect. And he spends some time discussing Strauss's piece, too. But he takes the story much farther, explaining why Nietzsche chose that religious figure as a mouthpiece.

The story begins back in 1718, when a British civil servant stationed on the west coast of India brought home a rare copy of the Zoroastrian sacred book called the Vendidad. No one could read it, but he donated it to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A few decades later, a young French linguist and adventurer named Abraham Hyacynthe Anquetil du Perron caught sight of a few pages, and determined on the spot to dedicate his life to translating it. He travelled to India to study the languages, where he had a series of adventures on the order of Indiana Jones, but without the fame or glamour; the British and the French were at war, which didn't help. At one point du Perron found it necessary to walk the length of the Indian coast from French Bengal to Surat. It took him two years.

He eventually got a hold of the Book of Zoroaster and a Pahlavi-Farsi dictionary. After overcoming additional obstacles, including a duel during which he suffered six or seven serious saber injuries, du Perron made his way back to France, where, in 1771, his three-volume translation of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian bible, were finally published. The scholars hated them, of course—an amateur, he had done what they didn't do—and the texts weren't widely accepted as authentic until 1820. An eminent British philologist wrote a widely-discussed paper on du Perron's ground-breaking work in 1857. Other translations were in the works. Zoroastrianism was suddenly a hot topic. At precisely that time, Frederick Nietzsche was entering his second-year of philological studies at the University of Bonn.

Kriwaczek spends a few pages describing how the dualistic beliefs of the Zoroastrians inspired Nietzsche's formulation of the genealogy of morals and the will to power, which Kriwaczek describes as an urge to "leave behind the animal-natured 'blond-beast' and strive for the 'super-human.'" As it happened, no one cared about Nietzsche's theories at the time. The first two volumes of Zarathustra sold fifty or sixty copies each, and when his publisher backed away from the final volume, Nietzsche was forced to print forty copies at his own expense.

A latter-day Sarmatian

In successive chapters, Kriwaczek takes up the case of the Cathars of Southwestern France, and then the Bogimils of the Balkan lands, both of whom embraced the Great Dualistic Heresy of Manichaeism. He visits the enormous rock at Montsegur and ponders the fate of those final victims of the Albigensian crusade, later rides the train east out of Vienna and through the Balkans to reach the flat grassy regions north of the Black Sea where the Sarmatians, an Iranian people, once ruled on horseback. Many of the cultural traits we now regard as gothic or medieval originated with them.

Kriwaczek dilates at some length on the life and career of Mani himself, who was not, strictly speaking, a Zoroastrian, but drew from that far more ancient faith a more pessimistic view of the eternal battle between darkness and light.

The Mithric mystery religion, so popular with Roman soldiers, inspires a trip, not to Rome, but to Hadrian's Wall, on the Scottish border. That faith, which succumbed relatively quickly to the arrival of Christianity, has not left much of a residue, beyond a vast assortment of statues now in museums depicting Mithra riding a bull while stabbing it in the neck with a knife,  but Kriwaczek muses that it may have made at least one lasting contribution to civilization—the handshake.

Things get more exotic, and even more interesting, as Kriwaczek turns to the eastern Mediterranean and begins to explore the intersections of Zoroastrianism with the incursions of Alexander the Great and the much earlier interpenetration of Iranian and Jewish cultures during the Babylonian Captivity. Alexander's wanton destruction of the library at Persepolis takes on a far more grotesque appearance seen from the Iranian point of view. And Kriwaczek's visit to the tomb of the Prophet Daniel in Susa makes for a fascinating interlude. 

Daniel's tomb in Susa

He devotes sixteen pages to unraveling who Daniel actually was, corrects the many historical inaccuracies to be found in the Biblical text that bears his name, and asks himself the question why such a tomb had not been destroyed by the Muslims centuries earlier. His conclusion, somewhat simplified, is that in the figure of Daniel were united, for the first time, the apocryphal traditions of Mesopotamian Jews and Iranian Zoroastrians.

Centuries later, According to Kriwaczek, the rabbis of the Talmud made an effort to expunge both Christian and Zoroastrian beliefs from their sacred canon in the belief that they were cleansing and purifying their faith. He writes:

"Zarathustra's two supreme powers [the good and evil forces] were an affront to Israel's One God. Yet to sit here in Susa, so close to the Persian tomb of a Jewish prophet, is to be forcibly reminded that the relationship between the two ancient nations had been so close for so long that many other Persian themes had successfully infiltrated Jewish thinking without being spotted. Without any sanction in the Torah, Jews had come to believe in heaven, angels and a life after death. And those teachings had come not from their own prophets but by the grace of [Zarathustra's highest spirit] Ahura Mazda."

It's interesting to note that Karen Armstrong, in her magisterial 400-page best-seller The History of God, mentions Zarathustra only three times. Well, it's a different kind of book, written within a shorter time-frame and with a different end in mind. Kriwaczek has given us a travel book, full of arcane facts but also of dust and ruins, mountain passes and indecipherable inscriptions, military conquest and sacred devotion, curiosity and humor. 

The fire in the temple in Yadz
has been burning for 1500 years.

The author doesn't claim to be a Zoroastrian. He is only interested to share with us, step by step, what he's learned about a fascinating chapter in Indo-European history. When, near the end of the book, he and a local driver arrive at 6 a.m. at the tomb of Cyrus the Great, thirty-five miles north of Shiraz, he spends many pages filling us in on the significance of this ruler—pages that made me consider getting my copy of Herodotus down off the shelf again—but he also takes time to inform us that the elderly man who emerged from a nearby caravan to unlock the gate for them was wearing flannel pajamas decorated with yellow daisies.    

___________

Zoroastrianism is still an active religion, practiced mostly by the Parsees of India, though the entire group could gather comfortably in a stadium to watch an Ohio State football game. After all these years, scholars have not been able to decide whether the faith should be classified as monotheistic, dualistic, or pantheistic. In any case, Zoroastrian purification rituals are closely bound up with both water and fire. It's that second element, fire, that interests me at the moment. I'm tempted to pull a chair up to the fire today and try to make my way through Georges Dumezil's Mitra-Varuna.