covenant, which is essentially a contract with God-is this where the idea originally came from? Two, a god of contract also suggests an urban, or urbanising, culture, with a growing merchant class; but third, and arguably the most important reason is that contract stood for fairness, and therefore justice.95 And here, for the first time, we have a god who is an abstract concept-this was Zarathustra's achievement. He broke with the tradition of a pantheon of gods. Tradition variously puts Zarathustra's birthplace in Rhages, the ancient town of Rayy, now on the outskirts of Tehran, or in Afghanistan or even as far away as Kazakhstan. By the time he was about thirty, however, Zarathustra had found his way to the court of King Gushtasp, the ruler of a tribe of people in the north of Iran, possibly the ancient site northwest of Kabul known as Balkh. There, he won over the king, and then the people, and his beliefs became the official religion. The crucial importance-and the mystery-of Zoroastrianism lies partly in its introduction of abstract concepts as gods, and partly in its other features, some of which find echoes in Buddhism and Confucianism, and some of which appear to have helped form Judaism, and therefore Christianity and Islam. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra was the source of the 'profoundest error in human history-namely the invention of morality'.96 Zarathustra envisaged three types of souclass="underline" the urvany , that part of the individual which survived the body's death; fravashi , who 'live the earth since the time of their death'; and daena , the conscience.97 Either way, Zoroastrianism may well have been the fundamental set of ideas that helped shape the world's major faiths as we know them today. The society into which Zarathustra addressed his ideas was a people who venerated fire and worshipped the familiar gods of earth and sky, plus a host of daevas , spirits and demons.98 Zoroastrians believe that Zarathustra received a revelation direct from the one true god, Ahura Mazda. In accepting the revelation, he imitated the primordial act of god-the choice of good. This is a crucial aspect of Zoroastrianism: man is invited to follow the path of the Lord, but he is free in that choice-he is not a slave or a servant.99 Ahura Mazda was also the father of a set of twins, Spenta Mainyu, the Good Spirit, and Angra Mainyu, the Destroying Spirit. These twins respectively choose Asha , justice, and Druj , deceit.100 Zarathustra referred to himself several times as a 'saviour' and this helped to shape his idea of heaven and the soul. In the religion of the day, which Zarathustra was born into, only priests and aristocrats were understood to have immortal souls, only they could go to heaven, whereas the laity were consigned to hell.101 He changed all that. He condemned the sacrifice of cattle as cruel and denounced the priestly cult of Haoma, which may have been a hallucinogenic plant related to the Soma mentioned in Hindu scriptures, and possibly cannabis or hemp, which Herodotus records as being used in rituals by the steppe nomads.102 At the same time, there is some evidence that early Zoroastrianism was itself an ecstatic religion, with even Zarathustra using bhang (hemp).103 The name of paradise in the new religion was garo demana , or 'House of Song', and there are ancient accounts of shamans reaching ecstasy by singing for long periods of time. The House of Song was in theory open to all in Zoroastrianism, but only the righteous actually got there. The road to the beyond passed over the Cinvat Bridge where the just and the wicked were divided, sinners remaining for ever in the House of Evil.104 The idea of a river dividing this world from the next is found in many faiths, while the idea of a Judgement became a major feature of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In fact, life after death, resurrection, judgement, heaven and paradise were all Zoroastrian ideas first, as were hell and the devil.105 One verse of the Gathas says that the soul remains close to a person's body after death, but after three days a wind arises. For the righteous it is a perfumed wind which quickly transports the soul to 'the lights without beginning, paradise', but for others it is a cold north wind, which drives the sinner to the zone of darkness.106 Note the delay of three days. The Israelites had been taken into captivity in 586 BC, by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzer. In 539, however, Babylon was captured by Cyrus, a Persian king who had also defeated the Medes and the Lydians. He and his followers spread Zoroastrianism throughout the Middle East. Cyrus freed the Jews and allowed them back to their homeland. It is no accident, therefore, that he is one of only two foreign kings to be treated with respect in the Hebrew scriptures (the other is Abimelech, in Genesis 21). It is no
accident that Judaism, and therefore Christianity and Islam, share many features of Zoroastrianism. The Buddha was not a god and he was not really a prophet. But the way of life that he came to advocate was the result of his dissatisfaction with the development of a new merchant class in the towns, their materialism and greed, and with the local priesthood, their obsession with sacrifice and tradition. His answer was to ask men to look deep inside themselves to find a higher purpose in life. In that, conditions in India in the sixth-fifth century BC paralleled those in Israel. Siddhartha Gautama was by all accounts a pessimist anyway, constitutionally inclined to look on the grimmer side of life. Nevertheless, the social and religious ideas in India were changing fundamentally at the time he was alive. Hinduism is a Muslim word for the traditional religion of India, and dates only from 1200 AD, when the Islamic invaders wished to distinguish the Indian faith from their own. (Hindu is in fact the Persian word for Indian-see Chapter 33 below.) Traditional Hinduism has been described as more a way of living than a way of thought.107 It has no founder, no prophet, no creed and no ecclesiastical structure. Instead, Hindus speak of 'eternal teaching' or 'eternal law'. The first record of these beliefs come from excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the twin capitals of the civilisation, about 400 miles apart, on the banks of the Indus river and dating to about 2300-1750 BC. A ritual purity appears to have been one of the central rites (as it is today), with prominent places for ceremonial ablutions.108 In addition there were many figurines of the mother goddess, which either showed her pregnant, or emphasised her breasts. Each village had its own goddess, embodiments of the female principle, though there was also a male god, with horns and three faces, known as Trimurti , which later found expression in Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Fertility symbols were also found, in particular the lingam and the yoni , representing, again, the female and male sex organs. Besides purification, the holy men of Harappa and the Indus valley practised yoga and renunciation of the world. The first change Hinduism went through occurred around 1700 BC, when India was invaded by the Aryan peoples. The Aryans arrived from Iran, as their name implies, but their exact origins have been one of the great mysteries of archaeology.* The Aryan impact on India was profound. Even today, northern Indians are taller and paler than their Dravidian compatriots in the southern part of the subcontinent. The Aryan language developed in India into what is now called Sanskrit, related to Greek, Latin and the other Indo-European languages which were discussed in Chapter 2. Their religion may have had links with that of Homer's Greece, insofar as there are parallels among the gods, which are mainly forces of nature. They practised sacrifice and performed their ceremonies around the fire, where they cast butter, grain and spice into the flames. They also are known to have used the drug, soma , which induced trances, by means of which the Vedas were 'revealed' to them. The fact that sacred fire was so important in their religion hints that they originally came from a northern (cold) region. Unlike the proto-Hindus, the Aryans did have a sacred text. This, written down about 800 BC, is known as the Rig Veda ('Songs of Knowledge'; vid = 'knowledge' or 'wisdom'). Many of these religious hymns may have been composed before the Aryans arrived in India, though by later times they were considered to be a revelation from Brahman, the ultimate source of all being.109 More than a thousand hymns (20,000 verses) make up the Rig Veda , and they are addressed to scores of different deities. The most important gods, however, are Indra, conceived as a warrior who overcomes evil and brings everything into being; Agni, who personifies the sacred fire (Latin = ignis ), which links heaven and earth by carrying the sacrifice upwards; and Varuna (the Greek god Uranus), a sky god but also the chief of the gods, and the guardian of cosmic order. As it developed, the Veda posited a world soul. This is a mystical entity, quite unlike anything else: it is envisaged both as a sacrifice and as a form of body, which gives the world order. The creator brought the world into existence by sacrifice-even the gods, their very existence, depended on continued sacrifice. The mouth of the world soul is made up of the priests (called Brahmans, to reflect their relationship to the fundamental source, Brahman: before the Vedas were written down, it was the Brahmans' responsibility to memorise and preserve them, father to son); the arms comprised the rulers, the thighs make up the commercial classes-landowners, farmers, bankers and merchants-and the feet are the artisans and peasants. To begin with, the four different classes were not hereditary but in time they became so, probably led by the Brahmans, whose task of memorising the Vedas was more easily achieved if fathers