This page provides information about the Prophet Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism.
Last updated 2009-10-02
This page provides information about the Prophet Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism.
Zoroastrianism was founded by the Prophet Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) in ancient Iran approximately 3500 years ago.
The precise date of the founding of Zoroastrianism is uncertain. An approximate date of 1200-1500 BCE has been established through archaeological evidence and linguistic comparisons with the Hindu text, the Rig Veda.
Zoroaster was born in Northeast Iran or Southwest Afghanistan. He was born into a Bronze Age culture with a polytheistic religion (the worship of many gods), which included animal sacrifice and the ritual use of intoxicants. This religion was quite similar to the early forms of Hinduism of the Indus Valley.
The name Zoroaster is a Greek rendering of the name Zarathustra. He is known as Zarathusti in Persian and Zaratosht in Gujarati.
Zoroaster's birth and early life are little documented. What is known is recorded in the Gathas - the core of the Avesta, which contains hymns thought to be composed by Zoroaster himself. Born into the Spitama clan, he worked as a priest. He was a family man, with a wife, three sons and three daughters.
Zoroaster rejected the religion of the Bronze Age Iranians with their many gods and oppressive class structure, in which the Karvis and Karapans (princes and priests) controlled the ordinary people. He also opposed animal sacrifices and the use of the hallucinogenic Haoma plant (possibly a species of ephedra) in rituals.
When Zoroaster was thirty years old he had a divine vision of God and his Amesha Spentas during a ritual purification rite. This vision radically transformed his view of the world, and he tried to teach this view to others.
Zoroaster believed in one creator God, teaching that only one God was worthy of worship. Furthermore, some of the deities of the old religion, the Daevas (Devas in Sanskrit), appeared to delight in war and strife. Zoroaster said that these were evil spirits and were workers ofAngra Mainyu, God's adversary.
Zoroaster's ideas did not take off quickly and at first he only had one convert: his cousin Maidhyoimanha.
The local religious authorities opposed his ideas. They felt their own faiths, power, and particularly their rituals, threatened, because Zoroaster taught against over-ritualising religious ceremonies. Many ordinary people did not like Zoroaster's downgrading of the Daevas to evil spirits.
After twelve years, Zoroaster left his home to find somewhere more open to new ideas. He found such a place in the country of King Vishtaspa (in Bactria).
The King and his queen, Hutosa, heard Zoroaster debating with the religious leaders of his land, and decided to accept Zoroaster's ideas and made them the official religion of their kingdom.
Zoroaster died in his late 70s.
Very little is known of the time between Zoroaster and the Archaemenian period except that during this period Zoroastrianism spread to Western Iran. By the time of the founding of the Archaemenian Empire, Zoroastrianism was already a well-established religion.
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