Nothing makes winning an argument easier than playing both sides, which is known as a straw man argument. Although the exact origins of the phrase are not agreed upon, one folk etymology nicely illustrates exactly how this works. This etymology is based on a military training exercise in which soldiers charge straw dummies and skewer them with their bayonets (see illustration). Take that!!
2. Although no complete version of the Orphic myth of Dionysos survives intact, classical scholar Sarah Iles Johnston has pieced together "the story in it's entirety", using a famous passage from Olympiodorus' commentary on Plato's Phaedrus along with a variety of other sources:Dionysus was the child of Zeus and Zeus' daughter Persephone. Dionysus succeeded Zeus; Zeus himself placed the child on his throne and declared him the new king of the cosmos. The Titans, jealous of Dionysus' new power and perhaps encouraged by Hera, used various toys, and a mirror, to lure Dionysus away from his guardians, the Curetes, and dismembered him. They cooked his flesh and ate it. Zeus, being angry at this, killed the Titans, and from their remains, humanity arose. Because humanity arose from material that was predominantly Titanic in nature, each human is born with the stain of the Titans' crime, but a remnant of Dionysus leavens the mixture. Each human must expiate the Titans' crime by performing rituals in honor of Dionysus and Persephone, who still suffers from the 'ancient grief' of losing her child; by doing so, humans can win better afterlives. Meanwhile Dionysus was in some manner revived or reborn.Johnston goes on to point out that "the typical reader" will find parts of this story "weird" because it differs from more widely known Dionysian myths found in Hesiod, Homer, Ovid, etc. The "Orphic" version of the story of Dionsysus, however, was widely known in antiquity long before Olympiodorus (6th century AD) and significant references to the Orphic version are known from sources as early as Callimachus, Plato and even Pindar. To understand this, Johnston asks us to
[Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets, p. 67]
So-called Orphism turns out to be a variant of Dionysianism, and one that is distinguished by it's own ritual texts and it's own version of the myth of Dionysos, a version that has multiple literary sources. Orphism is also closely identified with both Pythagoreanism and Platonism, and many of our most important literary sources for Orphism are late antique Platonic writings. The hieroi logoi of Orphism, then, include scripts for rituals, literary accounts of the cultic mythos, and an extensive philosophical literature stretching from Pythagoras (born ca 570 BC) to Olympiodorus (died 570 AD).remember that in contrast to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the religions of ancient Greece had no canonical, sacred texts. Myths and especially myths asssociated with cults, were fluid; now one version of a story and now another was invoked to suit particular circumstances.
[pp. 67-68]
This one has been making the rounds on teh internets recently:The historians of the various nations have given us their accounts -- accounts, it goes without saying, that offer us a very one-sided version of their national religions, and a biased view of the religions of surrounding peoples. The prophets of the Jews and their great hero, Moses, wrote the history of their people in a way designed to favor their beliefs. The Egyptian view of the Jews, not surprisingly, is quite different. Yet behind these views, these national prejudices, is an ancient logos that has existed from the beginning -- a logos, so it is said, maintained by the wisest men of all nations and cities. This logos has been held not only by the sages among the Jews, but by the wise men of the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Indians, Persians, Odrysians, Samothracians, and Eleusians. The Galactophagi of Homer, the Druids of Gaul, and even the Getae (for example) believe logoi very close to those believed by the Jews -- indeed, before the Jews. Linus, Musaeus, Orpheus, Pherecydes, Zoroaster the Persian, and Pythagoras understood these logoi, and their opinions were recorded in books which are still to be consulted.
[Celsus Alethes Logos, Hoffman translation/reconstruction, p. 55]
If there were truth in advertising, the Abrahamic religions would be known as "Religions That Burn Books", rather than as "Religions of the Book." And Pagan, polytheistic religions would be known as "Religions of the Library."
In the late fourth and early fifth centuries AD, die-hard Pagans such as Macrobius and Servius spoke of Vergil as Pontifex Maximus. And throughout the Middle Ages The Poet was considered a semi-divine being not only in "high" literature such as Dante's Divine Comedy, but in popular beliefs current among the illiterate masses, who envisioned Vergil as a Magician, Sage and Saint.
OK boys and girls, it's high time for a psychic palate cleanser!!Since 1997, Snappy Dance Theater has been enriching the lives of audiences of all backgrounds and ages with its edgy yet accessible style of dance theater. Blending dance with theater and acrobatics, Snappy Dance Theater has taken its audiences around the United States and abroad on a journey that's thought-provoking, often humorous, and always entertaining.
[also see: "'Christian Side Hug': Is this for real??"]"God. Purpose. Culture."The 2009 EG Conference was held in late February 2009, just a couple of weeks before "Christian Side Hugs" video was first posted on youtube (here is the website for the 2010 conference). The description of the video states, apparently in complete seriousness, "Breaking it down EG style."
I realize that the side hug probably started occuring because of two main reasons. First, there was some concern amongst churchfolk that full-frontal hugs could arrouse sexual tension between a man and a woman. It might send mixed signals and confuse both parties, thus we should clearly communicate with perhaps a few pats around the shoulder, "Hey...you're...a...good...friend." Thus we came up with the side hug to avert this all together to show people that we're close, but not that close. The second reason is because somewhere along the way guys were educated to the point that they realized that giving hugs showed they had some degree of emotional depth. However, going in for the real deal posed too much of a threat to their masculinity, so they came up with the side-hug as a worthy compromise.The person who wrote this blog entry sounds very matter-of-fact about all this, and also sounds quite rational, sane and intelligent. And there are several comments to that blog entry, one of them from a young Christian minister who says that he was taught to give side-hugs as part of his training! So it looks like this is the real thing. Oh. My. Fucking. Gods.
[From the "There and Back Again" blog -- entry for 3-23-2006]
Frank debate is inversely proportional with street violence, and those secularists who suppress such debate are among the culprits of India's communal problem. Unfortunately, the BJP chose to join in this 'secular' (in Europe we would call it anti‑secular) shielding of medieval belief systems from rational investigation and informed debate.
This half‑heartedness made it impossible for the party to argue its case on Ayodhya convincingly. Next to the well-known media bias, this was the main reason why world opinion turned massively against the Hindus. It is entirely obvious that a Hindu sacred site belongs to the Hindus, and no Westerner would want his own sacred sites to be desecrated; yet every single commentator in the West has strongly condemned the Hindu attempt to end the Islamic occupation of a Hindu sacred site.
While in most controversies, there will be some support somewhere for both the sides, in this case, there was no voice of support or even of understanding for the Hindu position. Without exaggeration, the BJP's Ayodhya campaign was the single biggest public relations disaster in world history.
The BJP never did any introspection about this harvest of hostility, but it certainly disliked the experience. After riding the 'Ram wave' to an electoral breakthrough in 1991, the BJP immediately started distancing itself from the issue. By December 6, 1992, Hindutva activists had lost patience with Mr. Advani. When they stormed the structure, he shed tears over the damage done to the BJP's self‑image, as did many BJP men in the party office when they heard the news.
Even VHP leader Ashok Singbal tried to stop the activists, until they threatened to pull off his dhoti. Anti‑Hindutva spokesmen want us to believe that this was all theatre, but it was genuine (as was Murli Manohar Joshi's jubilation). A small Hindutva faction had prepared the demolition, deliberately keeping the leadership in the dark about it.
If the Indian media had meant business, they would have found out and told you within a few days just who engineered the 'Kar Seva'. Instead, they chose to spurn the scoop of the year and stuck to the politically more useful version that the BJP did it, somewhat like late Jawaharlal Nehru's attempt to implicate Veer Savakar in Nathuram Godse's murder of the Mahatma.
Most BJP leaders (Kalyan Singh being the chief exception) dealt with the event in a confused and insincere manner. The gradual BJP retreat from Ayodhya was completed overnight, and the party was reduced to waging its subsequent election campaign with colourless slogans like 'good government'.
This purely secular posturing worked well in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, but it may prove to be yet another "cheque which can be cashed only once," especially considering the BJP's recent loss of credibility regarding governance.
The party's best chance of a meaningful survival now lies in the adoption of a better‑considered Hindu agenda, not focused on dead buildings but on consequential political reforms.
[The Observer Of Business And Politics, New Delhi, Friday December 6, 1996.]
The experience of December 6 and 7, 1992, suggests that the secularist media will counter the BJP initiative with hysterical shrieks, whipping up communal passions and de facto inciting riots. Back then, commentators trumpeted that along with the Masjid, the secular state itself had been demolished, so was democracy and even the Indian 'Muslims' very right to live. Who would not have taken to the streets if it was made so clear that the heavens themselves had fallen?
Next time, they will call the implementation of Article 44 similar names say, "a perversion of our secular Constitution," or rabid attack on the most intimate dimensions of the Islamic component of our composite culture." Hindus will again be blackened worldwide as intolerant, there will be murder and destruction, the BJP will burn its fingers again, and I just don't think that a Common Civil Code is worth all that misery.
Instead, the BJP ought first of all to take up an issue which really matters for Hindu communal life abolishing the legal and constitutional discriminations against the Hindu majority, most urgently those in education and temple management. The constitutional bedrock of these discriminations is Article 30, which accords to the minorities the right to set up and administer their own schools and colleges, preserving their communal identity (through the course contents and by selectively recruiting teachers and students), all while receiving state subsidies. That right is not guaranteed to the majority, but should be.
The problem was highlighted when the Ramakrishna Mission went to court to seek recognition as a non‑Hindu minority in order to protect its schools from a take‑over by the West Bengal government. It says a lot about the sorry state of the Hindu intellect that the debate focused entirely on the RKM's ridiculous claim, and not on the constitutional injustice underlying this tragi‑comedy.
The BJP, too, failed to rise to the occasion. In fact, the longest sitting parliamentarian in India, Atal Behari Vajpayee, never moved a finger to remove this thorn from the side of the Hindu society. When foreign newsmen ask BJP leaders about the notion of "pseudo‑secularism" the answer usually mentions Article 30, but the record shows that the BJP does not mean business.
An analogous problem exists for the Hindu temples. Mosques and churches are exclusively managed by the respective communities, but Hindu temples are routinely taken over by the secular authorities. This results in misappropriation of the temple's income and its redirection to non‑Hindu purposes. It is also a major factor in the grinding poverty afflicting most Hindu temple priests and their families.
Recently, the authorities moved court (unsuccessfully) to get the Shirdi Sai Baba temple in Hyderabad registered as a Hindu temple, all for wresting control of the institution and its funds. The BJP does not deserve to get a single Hindu vote if it doesn't address to this injustice.
The BJP can at once take an initiative in Parliament to remove these discriminations. This will force the other parties to take a stand. Either they support secular equality, ensuring a majority for the BJP's proposed amendment. The party can then claim that at long last, it had really achieved something for the Hindus. Alternately, the other parties may defend discrimination and religious inequality, defeating the BJP's amendment. In that case, the proposed amendment comes centrestage in the next election campaign, not as a marginal item on page 64 of the BJP election manifesto (as in 1996), but as the central theme.
Such a campaign will be better for the BJP and for India than a controversy over temple sites or the Common Civil Code. Abolition of the said discriminations is far more consequential for Hindu culture. It is impeccably secular, even to the extent that it will be difficult to fool world opinion into believing that this is "Hindu fundamentalism" again. It does not directly affect the minorities and is far less likely to antagonise them. So, it is far easier to handle. Even the BJP could do it.
[The Weekend Observer, New Delhi, Saturday, December 7, 1996.]
In 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi gave in to Muslim pressure in the Shah Bano affair. Overruling a secular court's decision that the repudiated wife Shah Bano was entitled to alimony from her ex-husband, he enacted a law abolishing the alimony provision in conformity with the Shari'a. Since India, unlike secular states, already had religion-based Civil Codes, this concession merely brought the minor matter of alimony under the purview of the prevailing arrangement. More importantly, it prevented riots.
Only months later, Gandhi restored the balance by giving the Hindus something as well: he ordered the locks on the Ram Janmabhoomi Babri Masjid in Ayodhya removed. Until then, a priest had been permitted to perform puja once a year for the idols installed there in 1949. Now, all Hindus were given access to what they consider as the birthplace of Rama, the prince posthumously deified as an incarnation of Vishnu.
Fundamentally, this decision didn't alter the Ayodhya equation. Architecturally, the building was and remained a mosque, while functionally, it had been and continued to be a Hindu temple. That is why in my opinion, not taking this decision wouldn't have changed the Ayodhya developments except in their timing. The different players, their strategies and goals, and their resolve to pursue these, all remained the same. The Babri Masjid Action Committee and the Vishva Hindu Parishad would have gone about their "business" just the same.
However, the VHP would have been forced to continue pushing the rather petty demand for removing the locks, rather than move on to the more ambitious and more mobilizing next step of planning the construction of a new temple. Most probably, the BJP would likewise have reaped smaller dividends from such a campaign. In 1989, it might not have jumped as high as 86 seats. Conversely, Congress might not have lost the North-Indian Muslim vote to the Janata Dal. In 1989, it could have remained just strong enough to cobble together a coalition rather than leave the initiative to the unwholesome and unstable Janata-BJP-Communist combine. So, at the level of party politics, Rajiv Gandhi's decision may have made a big difference.
On the other hand, the presence or absence of locks might have made little difference to the Kar Sevaks who brought the building down in 1992. Then again, with a Rajiv Gandhi government returning to power in 1989, there might have been no reason for this extreme move. The Hindus might by then have gotten their sacred site without a fight.
After all, in a situation where both Hindus and Muslims were laying claim to the site, Gandhi's decision in 1986 was important because it allowed for only one interpretation: he favoured the Hindu claim. This was logical, for the site has a sacred significance for Hindus as the putative birthplace of Rama, while it had no special status for Muslims. Historical documents confirm that Hindus continued to go on pilgrimage to the site all through the centuries of Muslim occupation, while no Muslim ever went on pilgrimage there.
Admittedly, a Muslim lobby had been formed which insisted on reoccupying this Hindu sacred site. However, the existing Congress culture notoriously knew how to deal with such problems: give the Muslim lobbyists some ministerial posts, some public largesse for their institutes or a raise in the Hajj subsidies, and they will come around. A small application of this approach was the annulment of Syed Shahabuddin's announced march on Ayodhya in 1988 in exchange for the governmental ban on Salman Rushdie's freshly-released book The Satanic Verses. A similar but bigger concession might have annulled the Muslim claim on the Ayodhya site. It would not have been the most principled policy, but it would have avoided a lot of communal blood-letting.
This pragmatic approach was thwarted midway. It is not often that intellectuals play a crucial role in politics, but this time they did. After the locks had been removed, India's Marxist intellectuals unchained all their devils in order to prevent the full restoration of the site as a Hindu pilgrimage centre. In particular, they started insisting that there had never been a Hindu temple at the site before a mosque had been imposed on it.
This was a strange claim to make, for two reasons. Firstly, it was untrue. Until then, all parties concerned had agreed that the mosque had been built in forcible replacement of a temple. What is nowadays rubbished as "the VHP claim" was in fact the consensus view. Thus, in court proceedings in the 1880s, the Muslim claimants and the British rulers agreed with the Hindu claimants on the historical fact of the temple demolition, but since it had happened centuries earlier, they decided that time had sanctioned the Muslim usurpation and nullified the Hindus' legal claim. Further, numerous documents and several archaeological excavations confirmed the history of the temple demolition (with the court-ordered excavations of spring 2003 removing the last possible doubts). The sudden denial of this history by a circle of Marxist historians was not based on any new evidence but purely on political compulsions. It seems that their long enjoyment of a hegemonic power position in academe had gone to their heads, so they thought they could get away with crude history falsification.
Secondly, the question of the site's history was beside the point. The decisive consideration for awarding the site to the Hindus, both for the Hindu campaigners themselves and for Rajiv Gandhi, was not the site's sacred status in the Middle Ages, but its sacredness for Hindus today. It is the Hindus of 1986 or indeed of 2004 who have been going on pilgrimage to Ayodhya, and they are as much entitled to find a Hindu atmosphere there, complete with Hindu architecture, as Muslims are entitled to find an Islamic atmosphere in Mecca. The VHP has been blamed for politicising history, but it was its opponents who complicated matters by bringing in history, and false history at that.
Nonetheless, the Marxist historians had their way. In their shrill manifestoes, these secular fundamentalists slandered the genuine historians who stood by the facts, and they denounced the Hindus' perfectly reasonable expectation that a Hindu sacred site be left in the exclusive care of the Hindus. They did this with such titanic vehemence that the pragmatists were thrown on the defensive.
Rajiv Gandhi didn't give up, though. In 1989, he allowed the Shilanyas ceremony, in which the first stone of the planned temple was put in place. In 1990, as opposition leader, he made Chandra Shekhar's minority government organize a scholars' debate on the history of the site, obviously on the assumption that this would confirm the Hindu claim. And so it did, for the anti-temple historians showed up empty-handed when they were asked to provide evidence for an alternative scenario to the temple demolition. In a normal course of events, i.e. without the interference of secularist shrieks and howls, this would have set the stage for the peaceful construction of a new temple in the 1990s, with some compensation for the Muslim community, and the conflict would have been forgotten by now. Instead, the sore has continued to fester. In 1991 Rajiv Gandhi was murdered, and his successors didn't have the good sense to continue his equitable and pragmatic Ayodhya policy.
[This article first appeared in the online version of the newsmagazine
'Outlook India' (issue dt. 23 August 2004) at the URL
http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20040823&fname=UCol+Koenraad&sid=1]
Just recently there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth concerning some t-shirts that were (but are no longer) for sale at Cafe Press. The t-shirts indirectly express a wish for President Obama to die, and for his wife and children to suffer terribly as well. The wish is expressed indirectly by way of a literary reference.
Of course what Deffinbaugh is saying should hardly come as shocking news to anyone. Everyone knows the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the slaughter of the first born of Egypt, etc. These are things that Jehovah is depicted as openly bragging about, and his worshippers, one would assume, must approve. Indeed, it is strongly implied that it could be very unhealthy to not approve! So if one is already worshipping a vengeful, jealous, smite-happy, God, why not pass along one's own personal suggestions for additions to the Divine Shit List?“Do Thou add iniquity to their iniquity, and may they not come into Thy righteousness. May they be blotted out of the book of life, and may they not be recorded with the righteous.” (Ps. 69:27-28)In fact, such "imprecations" are nothing other than the true face of so-called "prophetic" Christianity. "Prophetic" Christianity is sometimes touted as if it were a kinder, gentler, liberal form of Christianity. In fact it is just a particular tone often adopted by Christians generally, regardless of party affiliation or political ideology, whenever they feel like claiming that all those who oppose them are "wicked". As discussed in this blog previously (see the post Doing the Lord's Work in Rwanda), "prophetic" Christianity attempts to replace the true underlying dynamic of monotheism, based on it's exclusive and intolerant claim to represent the one and only True Religion, with a more palatable claim, that it represents freedom and justice against oppression and injustice.
"O that Thou wouldst slay the wicked, O God; depart from me, therefore, men of bloodshed. For they speak against Thee wickedly, and Thine enemies take Thy name in vain. Do I not hate those who hate Thee, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against Thee? I hate them with the utmost hatred; they have become my enemies." (Ps. 139:19-22)"Remember, O Lord, against the sons of Edom the day of Jerusalem, who said, 'Raze it, raze it, to its very foundation.' O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one, how blessed will be the one who repays you with the recompense with which you have repaid us. How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rock." (Ps. 137:7-9)
"Do give heed to me, O Lord, and listen to what my opponents are saying! Should good be repaid with evil? For they have dug a pit for me. Remember how I stood before Thee to speak good on their behalf, so as to turn away Thy wrath from them. Therefore, give their children over to famine, and deliver them up to the power of the sword; and let their wives become childless and widowed. Let their men also be smitten to death, their young men struck down by the sword in battle. May an outcry be heard from their houses, when Thou suddenly bringest raiders upon them; for they have dug a pit to capture me and hidden snares for my feet. Yet Thou, O Lord, knowest all their deadly designs against me; do not forgive their iniquity or blot out their sin from Thy sight. But may they be overthrown before Thee; deal with them in the time of Thine anger!" (Jer. 18:19-23)
"And when He broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained; and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, 'How long, O Lord, holy and true, wilt Thou refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?'" (Rev. 6:9-10)
109:1 Be not silent, O God of my praise!
12 Let there be none to extend kindness to him,
20 May this be the reward of my accusers from the Lord,
29 May my accusers be clothed with dishonor;
(1) Cook 1/3 cup split peas together with 1/3 cup lentils with 1 or 2 bay leaves.
The following excerpts are from Rick Sky's book The Show Must Go On: The Life of Freddie Mercury (Citadel Press/Carol Publishing Group: New York City, NY, 1994). These excerpts can all be found in the adherents.com com article The Religious Affiliation of Freddie Mercury.
November 24 will be the 18th anniversary of the death of Freddie Mercury. Among very many other things, Mercury is probably the world's most famous Zoroastrian. The beautiful drawing of Freddie to the right, by the way, was done by Julie Popowicz.The perspective of Mary Boyce, who has died aged 85, on Zoroastrianism, the world's first monotheistic religion, was transformed by a year of fieldwork in 1966 among orthodox Zoroastrians in remote villages around the desert city of Yazd in central Iran.
But in the very next sentence, we are told that "What she discovered there led her to question many scholarly assumptions about the prophet Zoroaster and his followers."!!!! One might never guess (in fact, how could one guess from what has just been said) that among these "scholarly assumptions" is the assertion that Zoroastrianism is a religion with one and only one God, in other words, precisely the kind of thinking that is intentionally perpetuated in the act of trumpeting Zoroastrianism as "the world's first monotheistic religion"!!! It's true that Boyce accepted, with strong and strongly worded reservations, the term "monotheism" as applicable to Zoroastrianism, while never tiring of criticizing those who misapplied anachronistic (and as will be shown below, not merely Christianizing but Protestantizing) interpretations to Zoroastrianism under the guise of "monotheism".
Many other Yazatas, in addition to that of Victory, were also revered in Zoroastrian Persia. Each of the twelve months had its own Yazata, and the same is true for each of the thirty days of each month. There was also a Yazata specifically for Prayer, named Sraosha (also known at the Yazata of Obedience). This Yazata gained in prominence during the Achaemenid period, but was already "beloved by Zoroaster himself. The prophet names him several times in the Gathas, and once (Y 33.5) calls him 'greatest of all', presumably as guardian of the means -- prayer -- through which man can approach God." [p. 74]1.
From the days of ancient Greece Zoroaster's own name had been familiar to the learned as that of a fabled Eastern sage; and when the Avesta came at last [in the 18th century] into [western] scholar's hands, they sought eagerly in it for teachings which would justify this fame. At the time European men of letters acknowledged the twofold authority of Christianity and Reason, that of the former being as yet unchallenged by scientific advance; and Zoroaster's faith, since it had been propounded by one of the great teachers of mankind, was expected to be of a kind which a rational Christian could approve. There was dismay when its scriptures showed it to be be on the contrary in many respects remote and strange. For onething, it was a faith which acknowledged, under God, many lesser divine beings, who were reverenced with a wealth of complex rituals and observances. Christianity and acquaintance with Greek mythology had combined to create in Europe a conviction that polytheism belonged to the childlike past of the human race, having been superseded for all advanced peoples by monotheism. Protestant Christianity, moreover (in which faith most Western interpreters of Zoroastrianism were reared), had no high regard for ritualism, even in the worship of a single God. To accept Zoroastrianism as it was, and to try to understand Zoroaster's teachings with the help of the living tradition, proved accordingly too much for the West; and a solution to the resulting dilemma was eventually found. in the middle of the 19th century, by the brilliant philologist Martin Haug. By painstaking study he isolated the Gathas (a group of seventeen ancient hymns) as the only part of the Avesta which could be regarded as the direct utterance of Zoroaster.; and he then proceeded, in all sincerity, to interpret these archaic and very difficult texts (concerning whose translation no two scholars to this day agree) independently from the actual beliefs and practices of Zoroaster's followers, whose forbears, he thought, must have early corrupted their prophets teachings. Struggling as a pioneer with these baffling hymns, Haug managed to understand Zoroaster to have preached a strict monotheism -- stricter even than that of the Hebrew prophets -- rejecting while he did so all the rituals of sacrifice and worship, apart from prayer. He assumed, that is, that the prophet of ancient Iran had been the bearer of a rational and ethical theism, which was so remote from the concepts and customs of his own people that, though they brought themselves to accept his teachings, they could not long live with their austerity, but soon distorted them, relapsing more or less into their former beliefs and ways.
One consequence of this simplification of Zoroaster's message was that it delayed recognition of his vital part in shaping those Messianic and eschatological doctrines which were to have so great an influence on later Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In seeking to exalt the prophet's stature, Haug in fact diminished his role in the history of human thought. His thesis proved, however, a potent factor in the development of Zoroastrian studies, and even in that of modern Zoroastrianism. In Europe it was adopted by a number of leading scholars, who were happy to be enabled thus to view Zoroaster in a way acceptable to their own time and culture; and in India, where Haug expounded it in person in the 1860's, it was warmly welcomed by one groups of Zoroastrians themselves. This was composed of Parsis who had received a Western education in Bombay, and who found in Haug's theories a swift and radical solution to a problem that had been tormenting them, namely how to reconcile the elaborate doctrines and usages of their venerable faith with 19th century scientific thought, and to maintain its dignity against the assaults of Protestant Christian missionaries. They gave ardent support to the idea thus presented to them that Zoroaster had not been a dualist -- a doctrinal position abhorrent to the proselytizing Christians -- but had taught a very simple faith, free from all ritualism and subtleties of dogma. Hence to become his true disciples they had only to reform the existing religion on this basis, making it once more a creed to which any thinking man who was not an atheist could readily adhere.
These reformists, setting vigorously about their task, expressed themselves mostly in English, and so it was their voices which were chiefly heard in the West, where by a circular process they were welcomed as confirming scholarly interpretations of their ancient faith. Within their own community they met, however, with strenuous opposition from those, both learned and simple, who were not so ready to abandon the beliefs and customs of their forefathers for a religion newly defined at a European desk.
[from the Forward]
2.
In his Gathas Zoroaster invokes, as well as Ahura Mazda and the seven Bounteous Immortals, the "other Ahuras" (who can only be Mitrha and Vouruna Apam Napat). He also refers by name to a number of the lesser yazatas: Sraosa, Asi, Geus, Tasan, Geus Urvan, Tusnamaiti, Iza -- beings who win mention in his hymns, it seems, because of their close association with the rituals of sacrifice and worship. It is clearly implied in the prophet's words what is stated in the tradition, that all these beings were part of the creation of Ahura Mazda, brought into being to help him oppose the forces of evil and owing him utter loyalty and obedience. This is the monotheism of Iran, preached by Zoroaster and maintained in the face of all adversity by his followers down to the 19th century AD: that in the beginning Ahura Mazda alone existed as a being worthy of worship, the solitary yazata, wholly wise, just and good. He is the only uncreated God, and is himself the first cause of all else that is good, whether divine or earthly, sentient or insentient -- for after bringing into being his divine helpers he proceeded, through them, to fashion the world and all that is good in it, as a further means of confounding evil and bringing it in the end to nothingness.
[p. 195]3.
... [T]hat the prophet himself venerated all these beings as individuals, together with Ahura Mazda, has the unwavering support of the whole Zoroastrian tradition down to the 19th century, as well as that of a minority of Western scholars. With respect to the alternate theory (that to Zoroaster they were merely 'aspects' of God) it has been justly said: 'the fervor of piety has nothing to do with such ... subtle distinctions, but addresses itself to divine Beings, whose beauty is felt here as fascinating and whose power is recognized as effective'. [Henry Corbin, Eranos-Jahrbuch XXII, 1953, 101] That attributes of a great god, having been isolated, should then be invoked and worshipped as independent divinities was already a characteristic of pagan Iranian religion, as we have already seen strikingly in the case of the lesser Ahura, Mithra: for around him, the Lord Loyalty, are grouped "Justice", "Judgin", "Valour" and "Obedience"(Arstat, Rasnu, Hamvereti, Sraosa); and close though these beings are to him, each has his or her own separate life, and all receive worship and offerings to secure their individual favors. Nor are these divinities less "abstract" than those of Zoroaster's own revelation. Reverence for deities who personified "abstractions" appear a dominant feature of Indo-Iranian worship, as does also the linking of such "abstract" personifications with concrete phenomena -- Loyalty with fire and sun, Troth with water. The mould in fact was already old in which Zoroaster cast his new doctrines.
[pp. 202-203]
