What is Zoroastrianism?

In the days of Esther, the people, who have been reduced to servitude, hide themselves. Mordecai, a servant of the all-powerful king, does not reveal his race until forced to explain his attitude toward Haman. Esther, under Mordecai's orders, hides her origin and does not dare declare it, which would be her ruin. She is a little like the 7,000 men who were not known at the time of Israel's apostasy and the notorious cult of Baal. Only, in the book of Esther, the people are not hidden from a triumphant display of idolatry. The sovereigns of Persia abhorred false gods and practiced the religion of Zoroaster which completely repudiated idols: no doubt it was a false religion, but it was not grossly idolatrous, like the religion of the Chaldeans. The Zoroastrian religion acknowledged a supreme God, Ormuz, a benevolent God, with His good genies, and a second God, a malevolent God, Ahriman, who was eternal like the first, contending against Him with equal power, and always seeking, together with His evil genies, to seduce man, but whose power must come to an end, leaving the benevolent God to triumph. This Ahriman is the devil who has succeeded in "seducing men by bringing them fruit to eat," and by this means depriving them of the advantages which they had enjoyed. In all this we see, along with gross errors concerning the nature of God, an altered echo of the primitive oral traditions — the original reality of which God has given us in His Word. Ahasuerus [has] little more than this feature — his religion — in common with Cyrus, his father Darius, and his son Artaxerxes.

(Vv. 6–8). In raising up Cyrus God would have all nations know that He is God and there is none else beside. The truth as to Jehovah is presented in contrast to the Zoroastrian belief of the Persians, by which they held that a certain eternal person brought into existence two powerful beings; one the creator of all good, and the other the author of all evils that afflict men. It is God who forms the light and creates the darkness; it is God who makes peace among the nations, and, in His governmental ways creates evil in the sense of punishment (see Job 2:19: Jer. 18:7–10). It is the LORD that does these things with the final result that blessing will descend from heaven, which earth will be open to receive. It will not be righteousness without grace, nor salvation at the expense of righteousness, but salvation and righteousness will “spring up together.”

The only modification, as far as I know, was the production, by an unknown monad of a good and an evil cause - the Bactrian and Persian faith, Zoroastrianism. Others got out of the difficulty by emanations. It was impossible for the supreme God, the monad, to have to say to matter: aeons with some, the Logos, demons, something like Zoroastrian Feroers, and the Logos, with Platonists, were resorted to by others to solve the difficulty for millions. The monad was alone, and while asleep nothing else was; if he woke, creatures appeared, but it was all Maya, illusion; when he went to sleep, they disappeared again. The true philosophy was to find it out, have done with creation, and be absorbed into universal spirit or into the one divine spirit. Modifications there might be; for hundreds of millions thought and think matter eternal, and that true philosophy, or true knowledge, is getting delivered from matter and gaining Nirvana, that is, being extinguished as a lamp goes out.

399 God is to be found in all idolatries, neglected and forgotten, it is true; but He exists in all mythologies, and is found in the conscience when awakened by fear. When men are in agony (so says a Christian of pagan times) they do not say, "Oh, immortal gods!" but "Oh God! a proof, I would add, of a soul naturally Christian." They made great gods and little gods, placed a god or a goddess at fountains, in woods, and wherever they could see the operations of nature; but behind everything remained the deep feeling that there was one only and all-powerful God. Thus among the Brahmins in India, in Egypt, among the Sabeans, among the Scandinavians, there were gods without end, yet one God not worshipped but owned as the source of everything. This God, the Author of all, rested in darkness. In India not a single temple was ever dedicated to him, but still He exists and is the source of everything. Among the Sabeans, the ancient Persians, there was another kind of pagan religion which recognised Ahrim and Ahrmasda, a bad and a good god, and in which God was worshipped in fire, and which had no idol; there was another god as the source of these. I say source, because a creation was not owned among the pagans. See Hebrews 11:3.

And it is false as to its history. Heathenism was, even in this aspect, the departure under devilish influence from the knowledge of God: Noah had this; and they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, and God gave them up to dishonour themselves. They degraded God to a brute, and themselves to worse after. It never was a training parallel to, and contemporaneous with, that of the Hebrews — a system of law given of God, and then corrupted. There was the knowledge of the true God, and men gave it up — as far as the history of these dark ages can be traced, a system deliberately taken up in Babel, to leave God, and separated into two hostile branches: — the Sabaeans, who did not go farther than taking fire as a representative of God, as the modern Parsees; and Ionism, a system of horrible wickedness and idolatry pervading India, Egypt, Phoenicia, and thence Greece, which made (possibly through Orpheus and the Cabiri, certainly in Hesiod and Homer) pretty poetry of it, and so passing on to Rome, and, I have little doubt, far and wide elsewhere, modified according to the spirit and character of nations — at any rate, in historically known nations, a common universal system.

But there is that in God, the sense of which is with difficulty lost in man, though he be without God in the world. This has turned the sense of a being above himself, perfect in knowledge and power, a Supreme Being, into what is the fruit of imagination or servile dread - Mythology and Fetishism. The visible powers of nature were deified, because a God was wanting for the heart. The legends of ancient days were turned into myths of the gods. Terror told of a revengeful power, and a world of retribution loomed to an unsatisfied conscience. Man would animate planets, because they moved without him: he would have poetical lusts in superficial and self-satisfied Greece; more calculated sobriety in Egypt, a sunny south of gods, and northern immensity of giants, and storms, and mountains in Scandinavia; or seek to solve the mystery of good and evil in Ahriman and Ahurmazdha in Arva, or revel in monstrous reveries in India. Cruelty and poetry might divide the world under the name of gods, but behind all there was everywhere Tertullian's "Testimonium animae naturaliter christianae," an "unknown God" - a Brahm, the origin of all things, a primeval source or power.

Zoroaster founded a heathen cult, whose writings are set forth in the Zend-Avesta. His followers are the Parsees and Guebres of India. The Parsees worship the sun. The children of Israel were bidden to stone to death any man or woman who worshipped the sun (see Deut. 17:2-7). Yet Freemasons are asked to “join hands” with such. Moses would have given Freemasonry short shrift in his day.

Zoroaster founded a heathen cult, whose writings are set forth in the Zend-Avesta. His followers are the Parsees and Guebres of India. The Parsees worship the sun. The children of Israel were bidden to stone to death any man or woman who worshipped the sun (see Deut. 17:2-7). Yet Freemasons are asked to “join hands” with such. Moses would have given Freemasonry short shrift in his day.

Classic fables, as being more familiar as well as divergent through poetic handling, need not be added. But in that universal worship of the serpent we see the superstition into which fallen man sunk, growing out of the fact which Moses relates from God. The time or rather place was not yet come to lift the veil and disclose the evil spiritual agent that made the serpent his vehicle. The book of Job gave the suited opportunity to mark him as the great "adversary." 1 Chron. 21:1, Ps. 119:6, Zech. 3 add a little more. All is in harmony, and utterly different from the Persian myth of Ahriman in conflict with Ormuzd. Scripture knows no dualism, but a rebel against the true God, a slanderer and tempter, of which after all Gen. 3 abides the witness, only less than Matt. 4 and Luke 4, with a vast detail over the entire N.T.

We are told that the Persians were famous for a two-fold system of idolatry ― Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. And so Jehovah declares His pre-eminence over all these principles which the Persian mind had deified, and with which it was familiar. It does not convey the thought that Jehovah directly creates evil; but it establishes His divine pre-eminence as God, above principles which are mere creatures or abstract qualities, and which the Persians held as gods; and to which he might attribute his victories.