{Seriously, I am done with the Devil after this...}
Gerald Messadie (from The History of the Devil):
Some four millennia ago, hordes of horsemen from the south of present-day Russia descended through the passes of the Caucasus to settle on the fertile plains of Iran. They exchanged the shores of the Black and Azov seas for those of the Caspian and the Persian Gulf; some of their tribes headed for Greece and Anatolia, while others pushed toward southern Scandinavia and Finland and, eventually, around 2000 BCE, reached the British Isles.
Among the baggage they carried with them was one of the most volatile explosives ever imagined. It was nothing at first, a few beliefs symbolized in the form of little statues and amulets, but it bore the seeds of the Devil. These emigrants, a collection of warriors and shepherds known today as the Kurgan people (from the Russian word for ‘barrow’), were to found the first religion in the world that pitted a unique Devil against an equally unique God.
These people have come to be called the Indo-Europeans, after the community of languages, all related to Sanskrit, they spoke. All the cultures that today we call ‘Western’ arose out of the Indo-European invasion. Many of the systems we rely on to interpret the world, including our deities, would not exist if the Kurgan people had not seized the Near and Middle East (as well as almost the whole of Europe). The Indo-Europeans were probably the most significant factor in the development of ancient religions, the greater number of Eastern and eastern Mediterranean ones having been influenced by both the geographical expansion that ensured the civilization’s safety and by its advanced political organization. Indo-European influences can be found, for instance, in Greek Orphism. Post-exilic Judaism, the various strains of Jewish and Christian Gnosticism, Christianity and Shiite Islam all bear its mark to some degree.
It can be argued that much of the monotheistic theology that founded modern cultures was formed within the Iranian matrix; our Jewish, Christian, and Islamic angels and archangels, and consequently our Devil, were born there. Pre-Zoroastrian Iranian Vedic belief revolved around two main groups of supernatural entities, the ‘ahuras’ or higher deities and the ‘daevas’ or lesser ones. These groups were ruled by two principal gods, Ahura Mazda and Mithra, who together governed the course of the sun, the moon, and the stars. There was no known counter-god or demon comparable to the Devil.
One fundamental Vedic belief, however, was that of salvation, an entirely new idea in the history of religions which suddenly came to assume great importance. The Devil would find fertile ground in this idea—because if you say ‘salvation’ you also say ‘damnation,’ and once you’ve said ‘damnation’ you’ve already said ‘the Devil’. The concept of salvation inherently entails that of sin. The salvation theme appears even more clearly in the myth of Mithra, a savior who, like the Christian one, is announced by prophets and whose birth, recalling that of Jesus, takes place in a cave, with the miraculous arrival heralded by the appearance of a mysterious star. Mithra is the celestial intermediary between two antagonists, Ahura Mazda (the Good One) and Ahriman (the Bad One), the governors of the universe.
The Iranian religion, which remained in existence until the third century CE, did far more than any other religion to mold the Devil. Iranian polytheism made up a centralized celestial government that, like earthly government, hinged upon a provisional balance between Good and Evil, and promised to disappear only after the ultimate victory of Good in an envisioned future.
And then came Zoroaster (c. 628-551 BCE). Anticipating the temptation of Jesus in the desert by more than six centuries, it was said that Satan tried to entice Zoroaster into abandoning his faith; after a struggle with demons, Zoroaster triumphed and drove them away. The books that speak of him are filled with tales of wonder and miraculous healings. Both in his own day and over later centuries, Zoroaster was considered not just a prophet but a supernatural being, which has led some to call him a myth—the fate of many a prophet.
We know enough about Zoroaster to sketch out a portrait of the man: a poor and temperamental poet, nonviolent, sensitive, perhaps a shaman, and someone who bore grudges. He hated cruel aristocrats, and he attacked with particular virulence those who engaged in bloody sacrifices, even though such rites traditionally characterized men’s cults. The religion which Zoroaster shaped had to distinguish itself, through its rigor and simplicity, from the polytheisms of the day. It had to impose itself not by the magnificence of its rites, its sacrifices, or the power of its adherents, but by its inner hold on the individual—and, to create that, it had to foster a feeling of urgency about what was at stake: the entering of or exclusion from Heaven, salvation or eternal disgrace.
Zoroaster’s restructuring of Iranian Vedic religion began as a reform, seemingly moderate and conciliating. It was only later that it became an outright revolution, with monotheism well and truly established. Ahuru Mazda became the one and only god worthy of veneration as the creator of Heaven and Earth, of the spiritual and material worlds. He was the sovereign, lawmaker, supreme judge, master of day and night, the center of nature, and the inventor of moral law. The relationship among Zoroaster’s Mazdaism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is obvious.
Ahura Mazda’s twin brother, Ahriman (the Bad One), became the God of Evil, whose worshipers were the ‘followers of the lie,’ led astray by untruth. Iran thus witnessed the first appearance of the Devil, a specific and unambiguous God of Evil. Ahriman was the peer of Ahura Mazda, and the two were destined to battle mercilessly. In some apocalyptic texts, it was foretold that a great war would come to pass during which Heaven would send down Mithra the Savior to destroy the forces of Evil by fire and sword.
In Zoroaster’s modified religion, the great prophetic tenets of monotheism appeared for the first time. Good and Evil became transcendent principles, and the ambiguities associated with older, pragmatic interpretations of existence vanished. Zoroaster made the dualism of Good and Evil official; both were immanent and preexisting, and their conflict was not to be resolved until the end of time.
Zoroaster’s conception of the world was so close to Christianity that one wonders if the church Fathers had perhaps read the Iranian texts: life is only a passage in which each thought, word, and action determines the individual’s fate in the hereafter, where the God of Good will punish the wicked and reward the virtuous. At the end of time, the dead will be resurrected; the Last Judgment will condemn the bad to Hell, while the good will live in Paradise for all eternity.
Under Zoroaster, the framework of the three ‘Abrahamic’ monotheisms had been erected. The Devil’s birth certificate was filled out by an Iranian prophet.
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