Esoteric Insights into Zoroastrianism

Zarathustra, Zoroaster, Zoroastrianism, Parsi Philosophy
“Zarathustra (Zend). The great lawgiver, and the founder of the religion variously called Mazdaism, Magism, Parseeism, Fire-Worship, and Zoroastrianism. The age of the last Zoroaster (for it is a generic name) is not known, and perhaps for that very reason. . . . But the Occult records claim to have the correct dates of each of the thirteen Zoroasters mentioned in the Dabistan. Their doctrines, and especially those of the last (divine) Zoroaster, spread from Bactria to the Medes; thence, under the name of Magism, incorporated by the Adept-Astronomers in Chaldea, they greatly influenced the mystic teachings of the Mosaic doctrines, even before, perhaps, they had culminated into what is now known as the modern religion of the Parsis. Like Manu and Vyasa in India, Zarathustra is a generic name for great reformers and law-givers. The hierarchy began with the divine Zarathustra in theVendidad, and ended with the great, but mortal man, bearing that title, and now lost to history. There were, as shown by the Dabistan, many Zoroasters or Zarathustras. As related in theSecret Doctrine, Vol. II., the last Zoroaster was the founder of the Fire-temple of Azareksh, many ages before the historical era.”

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HPB: “No more philosophically profound, nor grander or more graphic and suggestive type exists among the allegories of the World-religions than that of the two Brother-Powers of the Mazdean religion, called Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, better known in their modernized form of Ormuzd and Ahriman. Of these two emanations, “Sons of Boundless Time” – Zeruana Akarana – itself issued from the Supreme and Unknowable Principle, the one is the embodiment of “Good Thought” (Vohu Mano), the other of “Evil Thought” (Ako Mano). The “King of Light” or Ahura Mazda, emanates from Primordial Light and forms or creates by means of the “Word,” Honover (Ahuna Vairya), a pure and holy world. But Angra Mainyu, though born as pure as his elder brother, becomes jealous of him, and mars everything in the Universe, as on the earth, creating Sin and Evil everywhere he goes. . . .
“The two Powers are inseparable on our present plane and at this stage of evolution, and would be meaningless, one without the other. They are, therefore, the two opposite poles of the OneManifested Creative Power, whether the latter is viewed as a Universal Cosmic Force which builds worlds, or under its anthropomorphic aspect, when its vehicle is thinking man. For Ormuzd and Ahriman are the respective representatives of Good and Evil, of Light and Darkness, of the spiritual and the material elements in man, and also in the Universe and everything contained in it. . . . The Parsis may have lost most of the keys that unlock the true interpretations of their sacred and poetical allegories, but the symbolism of Ormuzd and Ahriman is so self-evident, that even the Orientalists have ended by interpreting it, in its broad features, almost correctly. . . .
HPB: “Thus, Angra Mainyu, being confessedly, in one of its aspects, the embodiment of man’s lowest nature, with its fierce passions and unholy desires, “his hell” must be sought for and located on earth. In occult philosophy there is no other hell – nor can any state be comparable to that of a specially unhappy human wretch. . . . Ahura Mazda alone, being the divine, and therefore the immortal and eternal symbol of “Boundless Time,” is the secure refuge, the spiritual haven of man. . . . Ahura Mazda stands here no longer as the supreme One God of eternal Good and Lightbut as its own Ray, the divine EGO which informs man – under whatever name. . . . the beneficent ray of Ahura Mazda, the radiant EGO-SUN . . . Angra Mainyu is only a periodical and temporary Evil. He is Heterogeneity as developed from Homogeneity. Descending along the scale of differentiating nature on the cosmic planes, both Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu become, at the appointed time, the representatives and the dual type of man, the inner or divine INDIVIDUALITY, and the outer personality, a compound of visible and invisible elements and principles. As in heaven, so on earth; as above, so below. If the divine light in man, the Higher Spirit-Soul, forms, including itself, the seven Ameshaspends (of which Ormuzd is the seventh, or the synthesis), Ahriman, the thinking personality, the animal soul, has in its turn its seven Archidevs opposed to the seven Ameshaspends.
“During our life cycle, the good Yazatas, the 99,999 Fravashi (or Ferouers) and even the “Holy Seven,” the Ameshaspends themselves (“The gods of light, the “immortal seven,” of whom Ahura Mazda is the seventh. They are deified abstractions.”), are almost powerless against the Host of wicked Devs – the symbols of cosmic opposing powers and of human passions and sins. Fiends of evil, their presence radiates and fills the world with moral and physical ills: with disease, poverty, envy and pride, with despair, drunkenness, treachery, injustice, and cruelty, with anger and bloody-handed murder. Under the advice of Ahriman, man from the first made his fellow-man to weep and suffer. This state of things will cease only on the day when Ahura Mazda, the sevenfold deity, assumes his seventh name or aspect. Then, will he send his “Holy Word” Mathra Spenta (or the “Soul of Ahura”) to incarnate in Saoshyant (Sosiosh), and the latter will conquer Angra Mainyu. . . . As an occult teaching says: During each of the seven periods (Races) the chief ruling Light is given a new name;i.e., one of the seven hidden names, the initials of which compose the mystery name of the Septenary Host, viewed as one.”
BPW: “There are two Occidental volumes which have misled Western readers these many years – Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Samuel Laing’s A Modern Zoroastrian. The former has deceived only the bourgeois mind into believing that Nietzsche’s Zoroaster was anything else but an imaginary figure of the German writer. The latter has done more serious damage; the author, a materialistic rationalist of repute, but a poor philosopher and a worse metaphysician, harnessed his badly digested reading on the religion of the Parsis (reading presumably done in his capacity as a globe-trotter) to adorn his thesis on the dualism of matter-polarity. . . . The book has misled even Parsis, especially those unfamiliar with the real metaphysics and philosophy of their own religion. Orientalists began speaking of the religion of Zoroaster as dualism, and Laing, the scientist, confirmed the theory – so, it became canonical! . . .
HPB: “The Magian knew not of any Supreme“personal” individuality. He recognized but Ahura, the “Lord” – the seventh Principle in man – and “prayed,” i.e., made efforts during the hours of meditation, to assimilate with, and merge his other principles, that are dependent on the physical body and ever under the sway of Angra Mainyu (or matter), into the only pure, holy andeternal principle in him, his divine monad. To whom else could he pray? Who was “Ormuzd” if not the chief Spenta Mainyu, the monad, the god-principle in us? . . . Does not this show that Ahura-Mazda is something which can be explained and defined only by the Occult Doctrine? And wisely does it explain to us that Ahura Mazda is our own inner, truly personal God and that he is our Spiritual light and the “Creator of the material world,” i.e., the architect and shaper of the Microcosm, Man, when the latter knows how to resist Angra-Mainyu, or Kama – lust or material desires – by relying on him who overshadows him, the Ahura-Mazda or Spiritual Essence.”

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BPW: “The doctrine of Fravarshi is of special interest to the student of Theosophy. Every creature, whatever the body may happen to be, has its spiritual counterpart which is Fravarshi. To begin with, Ahuramazda himself has his Fravarshi and he recommends Zoroaster to invoke his Fravarshi and not himself, i.e., the impersonal and true essence of Deity, one with Zoroaster’s own atman (or Christos), not the false and personal appearance. The seven Amesha-spentas, all the religious teachers like Zoroaster, all warrior-souls, all evil-doers, animals, plants, minerals, everything has a Fravarshi. The coming into manifestation of these Fravarshis, their evolution and ultimate destiny are all described in Zend, Pahalvi and Persian books. As H.P.B. points out, this doctrine influenced Church-Christianity, and Ferouer is but a corrupted concept-word of the Zend Fravarshi.”

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“On page 6 of his Introduction IV to Part I of the Zend-Avesta – the Vendidad, Mr. J. Darmesteter has the following remark: “The Ancestors of the Indo-Iranians had been led to speak of seven worlds, the Supreme God was often made sevenfold, as well as the worlds over which he ruled . . . . The seven worlds became in Persia the seven KARSHVARE of the earth: the earth is divided into seven KARSHVARE, only one of which is known and accessible to man, the one on which we live, namely, ‘hvaniratha’: which amounts to saying that there are seven earths.” The latter belief is attributed, of course, to ignorance and superstition. Nor do we feel quite certain that this opinion will not be shared by those of our readers who neither are Chelas nor have read the “Fragments of Occult Truth.” But we leave it with the “lay Chelas” and others to judge whether this sevenfold division (see Farg. XIX) is not the ABC of the Occult Doctrines.”
“It was mentioned elsewhere that the belief in the septenary constitution of our “chain” was the oldest tenet of the early Iranians, who got it from the first Zarathustra. It is time to prove it to those Parsis who have lost the key to the meaning of their Scriptures. In the Avesta the earth is considered septempartite and tripartite at one and the same time. . . . The Avesta has not borrowed the idea from the Rig-Veda, but simply repeats the esoteric teaching. The “three strata or layers” do not refer to our globe alone, but to three layers of the globes of our terrestrial chain – two by two, on each plane, one on the descending, the other on the ascending arc. Thus, with reference to the six spheres or globes above our earth, the seventh and the fourth, it isseptempartite, while with regard to the planes over our plane – it is tripartite. The meaning is carried out and corroborated by the text in the Avesta and Vendidad, and even by the speculations – a most laborious and unsatisfactory guess-work – of the translators and commentators. It thus follows that the division of the “earth,” or rather the earth’s chain, into seven Karshvars is not in contradiction with the three “zones,” if this word is read “planes.” As Geiger remarks, this septenary division is very old – the oldest of all – since the Gathas already speak of the “septempartite earth.” (Bumi haptaiti,Yasna, xxxii., 3.) . . . Now Qaniratha is not, as believed by Geiger and his translator, “the country inhabited by the Iranian tribes,” and the other names do not mean “the adjacent territories of foreign nations in the North, South, West, and East” (p. 132), but our globe or Earth. For that which is meant by the sentence which follows the last quoted, namely, that “two Vorubarshti andVoru-Zarshti lie in the North; two, Vidadhafshu andTradadhafshu in the South; Savahi and Arzahi in the East and West,” is simply the very graphic and accurate description of the “chain” of our planet, the Earth, represented in the book of Dzyan (II) thus:
Planetary Chain, Zoroastrianism, The Secret Doctrine, H.P. Blavatsky

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HPB: “And now, if we are asked, as we have been repeatedly, if there are indeed men in whose power it is to give the correct version of true Zoroastrianism, then why do not they do so? – we answer, “because very few will believe it in thisour age.” Instead of benefiting men, they would but hurt the devotees of those truths. And as to giving to the world more information about the locality known as Airyanam Vaego, we need point but to the sentence in Fargard I, in which we find Ahura Mazda saying to Spitama, “the most benevolent,” that he had made every land – even though it had no charms whatever in it – dear to its dwellers, since otherwise the “whole living world would have invaded the Airyanam Vaego” (v. 2). Hence unable to satisfy our readers, we can say but very little. . . . Why do we find Zoroaster in the Bundehesh offering a sacrifice in “Iran Vej” – distorted name for Airyanam Vaego – and where or what was this country? Though some Orientalists call it “no real country,” and others identify it with the basin of the Aras, the latter has nothing to do with Airyanam Vaego. The last Zarathust may have chosen, and he has so chosen, the banks of the Aras for the cradle of his newly reborn religion; only that cradle received a child reborn and suckled elsewhere, namely, in Airyanam Vaego (the true “seed of the Aryas,” who were then all that was noble and true) which place is identical with the Shamballah of the Hindus and the Arhats, a place now regarded also as mythical. In Fargard II Ahura Mazda calls together “a meeting of the celestial gods,” and, Yima, the first man “of the excellent mortals,” in the Airyanam Vaego – “in the far-off lands of the rising sun,” says the Book of Numbers of the Chaldees, written on the Euphrates. Those of the Parsees who have ears, let them hear, and – draw their inferences; and perchance it may be also found that the Brahmans who came from the North to India bringing with them all the learning of secret wisdom, came from a place still more northward than Lake Mansarovar.”

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“We have no right to give out in this journal the correct number of years, or rather of ages upon ages, since – according to the doctrines of the Secret Science – the first seeds of Magianism were sown by the hand of the BEING to whose duty it falls to rear, nurse and guide the tottering steps of the renascent human races that awake anew to life on every planet in its turn, after its periodical “obscuration.” It goes as far back as the days of our local Manvantara, so that the seeds sown among the first “root-race” began sprouting in its infant brain, grew up, and commencing to bear fruit toward the latter part of the second race, developed fully during the third into what is known among Occultists as the “Tree of Knowledge” and the “Tree of Life” – the real meaning of both having been, later on, so sadly disfigured and misinterpreted by both Zoroastrians and Christians.”

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HPB: “The Zend-Avesta represents now only the general system, the dead letter, so to say, of the dictates of Zoroaster. . . . As well expressed by Darmesteter, the Parsee “sacred books are the ruins of a religion.” . . . the Avesta of modern Parseeism, with its numberless interpolations and arbitrary commentaries . . . the [original] Zend text is simply a secret code of certain words and expressions agreed upon by the original compilers, and the key to which is but with the Initiates. The Western scholars may say, “The key to the Avesta is not the Pahlavi, but the Vedas“; but the Occultist’s answer is, “Aye; but the key to the Vedas is the Secret Doctrine.” The former assert correctly enough that “the Vedas come from the same source as the Avesta“; the students of Occultism ask: “Do you know even the A B C of that source?””
HPB: “The first Zara-Ishtar was a Median, born in Rae, say the Greeks, who place the epoch in which he flourished five or six thousand years before the Trojan war; while according to the teachings of the Secret Doctrine this “first” was the “last” orseventh Zarathushtra (the thirteenth of theDesatir) though he was followed by one moreZuruastara or Suryacharia (later, owing to a natural change of language transformed into Zuryaster and again into Zarathushtra), who lived in the days of the first Gushtasp (not the father of Darius, though, as imagined by some scholars). The latter is very improperly called “the founder” of modern Monotheistic Parseeism, for besides being only a revivalist and the exponent of the modern philosophy, he was the last to make a desperate attempt at the restoration of pure Magianism. He is known to have gone from Shiz, to the Mt. Zebilan in the cave whither proceeded the Initiates or the Magi; and upon emerging from it to have returned with the Zend-Avesta re-translated and commented upon by himself. This original commentary, it is claimed, exists till now among other old works in the secret libraries. But its copies – now in the possession of the profane world, bear as much resemblance to it as the Christianity of today to that of its Founder.”
BPW: “Originally the Vendidad was pre-eminently an Occult treatise; it has passed through innumerable vicissitudes and distortions during these thousands of years, as through scores of editions in the course of the evolution of languages; in its present form it is but a fragment, and a patched-up one at that – put together mostly from memory and surviving documents, some of doubtful authenticity from the occult point of view, after the exploits of the vandal Iskander, whom the West knows as Alexander and calls “Great”! . . . The original treatises – codes of law like Vendidad, or hymns like the fiveGathas, or litanies like the Yasna – are almost all extinct. The sparse fragments we now possess are worse than fragmentary, for interpolations have taken place. All the same they are full of high philosophy, noble ethics, and not altogether devoid of....
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