The Age of the Great Classics
Cyrus the Great, Wikimedia Commons
The Persian Period: 539 - 331 B.C.
Ethical Dualism
The Persian prophet Zoroaster, who is estimated to have lived around 1000 B.C., is the first personality to have worked creatively and formatively upon the course of religious history. The first novelty of this radically new teaching lay in its treatment in purely ethical terms of the ultimate nature and destiny of both mankind and the world. In the Orient and India, principles of fundamental world reform or renovation were not introduced. The cosmic order of eons, ever cycling in a mighty round of ineluctably returning ages – from eternity, through eternity – would never by act of any man be changed from its majestic way. And in the Far East, whether in the mythic fields of Shinto, Taoism, and Confucianism, or in the Mahayana, the world was not to be reformed, but only known, revered and its laws obeyed.
In Zoroaster’s new mythic view, on the other hand, the world, as it was, was corrupt – not by nature, but by accident – and to be reformed by human action. Wisdom, virtue, and truth lay therefore in engagement, not in disengagement. The crucial line of decision between ultimate being and non-being was ethical. The primal character of creation had been light, wisdom, and truth, into which, however, darkness, deception, and the lie had entered. It was now man’s duty to eradicate these through his own virtue in thought, word and deed. His teaching pointed to two contrary powers that made and maintained the world in which men live. First, Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Life, wisdom and Light – Creator of the Righteous Order. Opposing him was Angra Mainyu, the Demon of the Lie, who, when the world had been made, corrupted every particle of its being.
The second novelty in Zoroaster’s teaching, is that he has a progressive view of cosmic history. He claims that the Demon of the Lie, Angra Mainyu, will be undone by the end of time, when truth alone will prevail. A third teaching is of certain powers proceeding from the Creator, which awaken their counterparts in man. Foremost of these are the archangels Good Mind and Righteous Order, to whom Perfect Sovereignty and Divine Piety bring support, accompanied by Excellence and Immortality. Opposed to these are the powers of the Lie, known as Evil mind and False Appearance, Cowardice, Hypocrisy, Misery and Extinction. These were later systematized as opposed hierarchies of beneficient Amesha Spentas and malignant Daevas – from where the Christian orders of angels and devils were derived.
Of high importance throughout is the idea of free will and decision. Each having chosen his cause, he must cleave to it, not only in thought, but in word and deed as well. And when the course of life is run, the soul at the Chinvat Bridge, the Bridge of Judgment, learns the nature of its earned reward. There is a memorable representation of this bridge in a late Zoroastrian work known as “The Vision of Arda Viraf”, composed at some undetermined date during the late Sassanian period of post-Alexandrian Zoroastrian restoration (226 – 641 A.D.). The document gives an account of an ardent visionary’s Dantean visit to the other world. In both the vision of Arda Viraf and in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the agonies of hell are far more vividly described, with infinitely more imagination, than the bliss of paradise, where all we ever see are various amplitudes of light, and mild companies, sitting, standing, or strolling, very beautifully clothed.
The King of Kings
The mighty Assyrian monarch Tiglath Pilesar III (745 – 727 B.C.) invented a new method of breaking the will of conquered populations. The earlier methods had been to either massacre all living things within a city or to reduce whole cities to servitude and tribute. The former custom had the disadvantage of depriving the ruler of subjects, whereas the latter was a recipe for revolt. Tiglath Pilesar’s idea was to sever the primary lifelines of attachment to the soil by transferring conquered populations to lands distant from their own. He went about doing that with all cities he conquered. Populations were tossed from east to west, north to south, and south to north, until not a vestige of the earlier, ground-rooted sense of a national continuity remained. The world historic role of the Kings of Assyria can be described, therefore, as the erasure of the past and creation of a thoroughly mixed, internationalized, interracialized Near Eastern population that has remained essentially thus ever since.
In the year 616 B.C., an alliance of King Nabopolassar of a revived Babylon with the Aryan King Kyaxares of the Medes who were coming down from the northeast, rose against the Assyrians, whose capital, Nineveh, was taken in 612 B.C.. The outraged populations of the Assyrian empire then did their work with such effect that it was a catastrophe of the mightiest kind. No people has ever been more completely wiped out than the Assyrians.
During the middle of the sixth century a new type of master appeared in the Near Eastern political theater, with a new idea of the state. In four masterful strokes, the Persian Cyrus the Great first overthrew King Astyges of the Medes in the year 550 B.C., and instead of putting his eyes out, flaying him alive, or otherwise mishandling him in the manner of all kings before, assigned to him a residence in his capital. Next, when threatened with an alliance of Nabonidus of Babylon, Amasis of Egypt, the powerful Croesus of Lydia, and the Greek city state of Sparta, he advanced directly against the chief antagonist, Croesus, and by the end of 546 B.C. was the ruler of Anatolia. He then bestowed on his defeated enemy the government of the city of Barene. Third, in 539 B.C. on his march to Babylon, he was met by an open invitation from the priesthood of the god Marduk to enter and take possession, which he did; and fourth, having become master of all of Hither Asia, he paid worship in the city of Babylon to Marduk, the god of that city, removed from the temple the captured images of the deities of numerous leading cities of the Near East, which he returned to their proper cites, and, finally, gave order that the people of Judah should be returned to their place and the temple of Jerusalem rebuilt. In the words of professor Eduard Meyer, the nobility of Cyrus’ character shines forth to us equally from the writings of the Persians whom he led to world mastery, the Jews whom he freed, and the Greeks whom he overthrew.
Cyrus’s son, Cambyses, took over the empire when Cyrus was killed in battle against raiding tribes in the northeast in 529 B.C. He continued the same policy, but was in turn killed in 522 B.C.in a battle engaged under the leadership of a Magian priest, Gaumata, who had falsely assumed the role of Cambyses’ brother while Cambyses had invaded Egypt. The Zoroastrian Gaumata resented the way Cyrus and Cambyses had allowed Yahweh and Marduk to flourish, in his view to the detriment of Zoroastrian faith. A relative of Cambyses, Darius, eliminated Gaumata and took over the empire under the name of Darius I. He reigned over the whole Near East from 521 to 486 B.C., and thus was a contemporary of Buddha (563 – 483 B.C.) and Confucius (551 – 478 B.C.). Those three represent the image of supreme spiritual authority by which each mythological province thereafter was to be hallmarked: respectively, the Levantine Despot under God, the Indian Yogi, and the Chinese Sage. In his own words, Darius had been king by the will of Ahura Mazda, and every enemy was an agent of his enemy Angra Mainyu.
The Remnant
From the time of the Persians onward, the cultural development the Near East has taken place in terms not of geographically defined nations but of churches, not of post-neolithic, earth-rooted primary communities, but of freely floating sects without geographical bounds. This was the major heritage from the Assyrian disruptive power play. The empire of Darius extended from the Greek Ionian isles to the Indus Valley, and from the Caspian Sea to the Upper cataracts of the Nile. During the millennium to come there would germinate and flower in this field a new and brilliant civilization of contending, mutually disparaging sects, related closely in spirit, yet in doctrines set wide apart. We have the Persian, Jewish and Chaldean myths of the earliest phase of this development, next of the Primitive Christian, Byzantine, and Gnostic, of the age of the flowering of the culture, and finally, of the rise and total victory of Islam.
There is a certain fairy-tale quality of wonder about everything in this bounded cavern world of the mythologies of the Levant, as though one pervading spirit dwelt within all. Each such teaching, furthermore, in a magical fairy-tale way has been revealed, once and for all, to be the permanent treasure of a certain group. Such a group is not a geographical nation, but a church, a sect, the company in possession of a magical treasure; and the functioning of its treasure is conditioned by certain fairy-tale laws, which are the statutes of the group. When obeyed, they produce boons beyond anything the world has ever known – fairy-tale boons; however, when violated, even accidentally, they produce catastrophe. As far as the principle of free will is concerned, its effect is only to make the individual responsible for his decision either to obey or to disobey. It is not his province to decide what is good and what is bad.
The God of Love
The King of Kings of Persia illuminated with the radiance of his justice his unprecedented domain, on one hand the Greek Ionian city states of westernmost Asia Minor (Satrapy I) and, on the other, the most ancient centers of Indian civilization, in the Punjab (Satrapy XX). The image of his grandiose lordship, with throne and palace in Persepolis, was supported by the most powerful social organization the world had up to then seen. It was so impressive that, though they endured for hardly two centuries, they have remained through all centuries since the ultimate figure and symbol of kingly majesty and rule. In India, in the court and theory of government of Chandragupta Maurya (322 – 293 B.C.), and in China, under Chi Huang Ti (221 – 206 B.C.), the model of the Persian King of Kings was copied and made definitive for all Oriental ideals of political method and achievement. In the Old Testament prophetic visions of the majesty of God, the imprint of the King of Kings of Persia can be recognized as the source. His radiance was of Ahura Mazda, but the instrument of his majesty was the whip.
In the luminous little Greek peninsula, beyond the benevolence of that divine Levantine government, in the Athens of Pericles, a quite different notion was developing of majesty and rule, and of the deity whose presence was the best support of law as well as of life. Here, where individual excellence was revered to such an extent, they revered the force and principle of Love – Eros. For no one achieves excellence in his life task without love for it, in himself without love for himself, or in his family without love for his home. Love brings everything to flower. “For,” as Agathon declared in his banquet speech, immortalized in Plato’s account of the grandest drinking party in the history of the world, “all serve him (Eros) of their own free will, and where there is love as well as obedience, there, as the laws which are the lords of the city say, is justice.”
Socrates learned of love from the wise woman Diotima, and two major points emerge: 1) The accent on the body, from which the statues of beautiful standing nudes appear as the signatures of the Classical, Apollonian order of experience. The Greek mind focused strongly on what was present to the senses. 2) The idea of beauty everywhere. Plato and his school identified the principle of love as the prime substance of all things, with the earlier principle of number, harmony, and the music of the spheres – which had already been linked to the magic of the music of the Orphic lyre. It has been shown that the figure of Dionysus looms behind the Orphic, who is ultimately that same mighty lord of death and resurrection whom we have recognized in Osiris, Tammuz, and the beautifully bearded golden bull of the graceful harp of the royal tombs of Ur in Mesopotamia.
In Hesiod’s Theogony (about 750 B.C.) the god of love, Eros, had been one of four separate deities named as original. One was Chaos, another Gaea (Mother Earth), Tartarus, the dark pit of Hades beneath the earth was third, and Eros the fourth. Hesiod tells no more of Eros, and it does not appear at all in Homer. Eros derives from the old pre-Hellenic Aegean stratum of mythological thought. He is linked definitely and firmly to Aphrodite and her child. The goddess Aphrodite and her son are exactly the great cosmic mother and her son, the ever-dying, ever-living god. In Greece, the accent of the same old basic mythic themes dramatically moved from the side of the ever-repeated archetype to that of the unique individuality of each particular victim; to the entire order of values that may be termed properly personal, as opposed to the impersonal of the group. This shift of loyalty from the impersonal to the personal may be termed the Greek mutation, which has had such a profound impact on western thinking. Even Zeus could think, reason, learn, and improve morally through time.
The Persian prophet Zoroaster, who is estimated to have lived around 1000 B.C., is the first personality to have worked creatively and formatively upon the course of religious history. The first novelty of this radically new teaching lay in its treatment in purely ethical terms of the ultimate nature and destiny of both mankind and the world. In the Orient and India, principles of fundamental world reform or renovation were not introduced. The cosmic order of eons, ever cycling in a mighty round of ineluctably returning ages – from eternity, through eternity – would never by act of any man be changed from its majestic way. And in the Far East, whether in the mythic fields of Shinto, Taoism, and Confucianism, or in the Mahayana, the world was not to be reformed, but only known, revered and its laws obeyed.
In Zoroaster’s new mythic view, on the other hand, the world, as it was, was corrupt – not by nature, but by accident – and to be reformed by human action. Wisdom, virtue, and truth lay therefore in engagement, not in disengagement. The crucial line of decision between ultimate being and non-being was ethical. The primal character of creation had been light, wisdom, and truth, into which, however, darkness, deception, and the lie had entered. It was now man’s duty to eradicate these through his own virtue in thought, word and deed. His teaching pointed to two contrary powers that made and maintained the world in which men live. First, Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Life, wisdom and Light – Creator of the Righteous Order. Opposing him was Angra Mainyu, the Demon of the Lie, who, when the world had been made, corrupted every particle of its being.
The second novelty in Zoroaster’s teaching, is that he has a progressive view of cosmic history. He claims that the Demon of the Lie, Angra Mainyu, will be undone by the end of time, when truth alone will prevail. A third teaching is of certain powers proceeding from the Creator, which awaken their counterparts in man. Foremost of these are the archangels Good Mind and Righteous Order, to whom Perfect Sovereignty and Divine Piety bring support, accompanied by Excellence and Immortality. Opposed to these are the powers of the Lie, known as Evil mind and False Appearance, Cowardice, Hypocrisy, Misery and Extinction. These were later systematized as opposed hierarchies of beneficient Amesha Spentas and malignant Daevas – from where the Christian orders of angels and devils were derived.
Of high importance throughout is the idea of free will and decision. Each having chosen his cause, he must cleave to it, not only in thought, but in word and deed as well. And when the course of life is run, the soul at the Chinvat Bridge, the Bridge of Judgment, learns the nature of its earned reward. There is a memorable representation of this bridge in a late Zoroastrian work known as “The Vision of Arda Viraf”, composed at some undetermined date during the late Sassanian period of post-Alexandrian Zoroastrian restoration (226 – 641 A.D.). The document gives an account of an ardent visionary’s Dantean visit to the other world. In both the vision of Arda Viraf and in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the agonies of hell are far more vividly described, with infinitely more imagination, than the bliss of paradise, where all we ever see are various amplitudes of light, and mild companies, sitting, standing, or strolling, very beautifully clothed.
The King of Kings
The mighty Assyrian monarch Tiglath Pilesar III (745 – 727 B.C.) invented a new method of breaking the will of conquered populations. The earlier methods had been to either massacre all living things within a city or to reduce whole cities to servitude and tribute. The former custom had the disadvantage of depriving the ruler of subjects, whereas the latter was a recipe for revolt. Tiglath Pilesar’s idea was to sever the primary lifelines of attachment to the soil by transferring conquered populations to lands distant from their own. He went about doing that with all cities he conquered. Populations were tossed from east to west, north to south, and south to north, until not a vestige of the earlier, ground-rooted sense of a national continuity remained. The world historic role of the Kings of Assyria can be described, therefore, as the erasure of the past and creation of a thoroughly mixed, internationalized, interracialized Near Eastern population that has remained essentially thus ever since.
In the year 616 B.C., an alliance of King Nabopolassar of a revived Babylon with the Aryan King Kyaxares of the Medes who were coming down from the northeast, rose against the Assyrians, whose capital, Nineveh, was taken in 612 B.C.. The outraged populations of the Assyrian empire then did their work with such effect that it was a catastrophe of the mightiest kind. No people has ever been more completely wiped out than the Assyrians.
During the middle of the sixth century a new type of master appeared in the Near Eastern political theater, with a new idea of the state. In four masterful strokes, the Persian Cyrus the Great first overthrew King Astyges of the Medes in the year 550 B.C., and instead of putting his eyes out, flaying him alive, or otherwise mishandling him in the manner of all kings before, assigned to him a residence in his capital. Next, when threatened with an alliance of Nabonidus of Babylon, Amasis of Egypt, the powerful Croesus of Lydia, and the Greek city state of Sparta, he advanced directly against the chief antagonist, Croesus, and by the end of 546 B.C. was the ruler of Anatolia. He then bestowed on his defeated enemy the government of the city of Barene. Third, in 539 B.C. on his march to Babylon, he was met by an open invitation from the priesthood of the god Marduk to enter and take possession, which he did; and fourth, having become master of all of Hither Asia, he paid worship in the city of Babylon to Marduk, the god of that city, removed from the temple the captured images of the deities of numerous leading cities of the Near East, which he returned to their proper cites, and, finally, gave order that the people of Judah should be returned to their place and the temple of Jerusalem rebuilt. In the words of professor Eduard Meyer, the nobility of Cyrus’ character shines forth to us equally from the writings of the Persians whom he led to world mastery, the Jews whom he freed, and the Greeks whom he overthrew.
Cyrus’s son, Cambyses, took over the empire when Cyrus was killed in battle against raiding tribes in the northeast in 529 B.C. He continued the same policy, but was in turn killed in 522 B.C.in a battle engaged under the leadership of a Magian priest, Gaumata, who had falsely assumed the role of Cambyses’ brother while Cambyses had invaded Egypt. The Zoroastrian Gaumata resented the way Cyrus and Cambyses had allowed Yahweh and Marduk to flourish, in his view to the detriment of Zoroastrian faith. A relative of Cambyses, Darius, eliminated Gaumata and took over the empire under the name of Darius I. He reigned over the whole Near East from 521 to 486 B.C., and thus was a contemporary of Buddha (563 – 483 B.C.) and Confucius (551 – 478 B.C.). Those three represent the image of supreme spiritual authority by which each mythological province thereafter was to be hallmarked: respectively, the Levantine Despot under God, the Indian Yogi, and the Chinese Sage. In his own words, Darius had been king by the will of Ahura Mazda, and every enemy was an agent of his enemy Angra Mainyu.
The Remnant
From the time of the Persians onward, the cultural development the Near East has taken place in terms not of geographically defined nations but of churches, not of post-neolithic, earth-rooted primary communities, but of freely floating sects without geographical bounds. This was the major heritage from the Assyrian disruptive power play. The empire of Darius extended from the Greek Ionian isles to the Indus Valley, and from the Caspian Sea to the Upper cataracts of the Nile. During the millennium to come there would germinate and flower in this field a new and brilliant civilization of contending, mutually disparaging sects, related closely in spirit, yet in doctrines set wide apart. We have the Persian, Jewish and Chaldean myths of the earliest phase of this development, next of the Primitive Christian, Byzantine, and Gnostic, of the age of the flowering of the culture, and finally, of the rise and total victory of Islam.
There is a certain fairy-tale quality of wonder about everything in this bounded cavern world of the mythologies of the Levant, as though one pervading spirit dwelt within all. Each such teaching, furthermore, in a magical fairy-tale way has been revealed, once and for all, to be the permanent treasure of a certain group. Such a group is not a geographical nation, but a church, a sect, the company in possession of a magical treasure; and the functioning of its treasure is conditioned by certain fairy-tale laws, which are the statutes of the group. When obeyed, they produce boons beyond anything the world has ever known – fairy-tale boons; however, when violated, even accidentally, they produce catastrophe. As far as the principle of free will is concerned, its effect is only to make the individual responsible for his decision either to obey or to disobey. It is not his province to decide what is good and what is bad.
The God of Love
The King of Kings of Persia illuminated with the radiance of his justice his unprecedented domain, on one hand the Greek Ionian city states of westernmost Asia Minor (Satrapy I) and, on the other, the most ancient centers of Indian civilization, in the Punjab (Satrapy XX). The image of his grandiose lordship, with throne and palace in Persepolis, was supported by the most powerful social organization the world had up to then seen. It was so impressive that, though they endured for hardly two centuries, they have remained through all centuries since the ultimate figure and symbol of kingly majesty and rule. In India, in the court and theory of government of Chandragupta Maurya (322 – 293 B.C.), and in China, under Chi Huang Ti (221 – 206 B.C.), the model of the Persian King of Kings was copied and made definitive for all Oriental ideals of political method and achievement. In the Old Testament prophetic visions of the majesty of God, the imprint of the King of Kings of Persia can be recognized as the source. His radiance was of Ahura Mazda, but the instrument of his majesty was the whip.
In the luminous little Greek peninsula, beyond the benevolence of that divine Levantine government, in the Athens of Pericles, a quite different notion was developing of majesty and rule, and of the deity whose presence was the best support of law as well as of life. Here, where individual excellence was revered to such an extent, they revered the force and principle of Love – Eros. For no one achieves excellence in his life task without love for it, in himself without love for himself, or in his family without love for his home. Love brings everything to flower. “For,” as Agathon declared in his banquet speech, immortalized in Plato’s account of the grandest drinking party in the history of the world, “all serve him (Eros) of their own free will, and where there is love as well as obedience, there, as the laws which are the lords of the city say, is justice.”
Socrates learned of love from the wise woman Diotima, and two major points emerge: 1) The accent on the body, from which the statues of beautiful standing nudes appear as the signatures of the Classical, Apollonian order of experience. The Greek mind focused strongly on what was present to the senses. 2) The idea of beauty everywhere. Plato and his school identified the principle of love as the prime substance of all things, with the earlier principle of number, harmony, and the music of the spheres – which had already been linked to the magic of the music of the Orphic lyre. It has been shown that the figure of Dionysus looms behind the Orphic, who is ultimately that same mighty lord of death and resurrection whom we have recognized in Osiris, Tammuz, and the beautifully bearded golden bull of the graceful harp of the royal tombs of Ur in Mesopotamia.
In Hesiod’s Theogony (about 750 B.C.) the god of love, Eros, had been one of four separate deities named as original. One was Chaos, another Gaea (Mother Earth), Tartarus, the dark pit of Hades beneath the earth was third, and Eros the fourth. Hesiod tells no more of Eros, and it does not appear at all in Homer. Eros derives from the old pre-Hellenic Aegean stratum of mythological thought. He is linked definitely and firmly to Aphrodite and her child. The goddess Aphrodite and her son are exactly the great cosmic mother and her son, the ever-dying, ever-living god. In Greece, the accent of the same old basic mythic themes dramatically moved from the side of the ever-repeated archetype to that of the unique individuality of each particular victim; to the entire order of values that may be termed properly personal, as opposed to the impersonal of the group. This shift of loyalty from the impersonal to the personal may be termed the Greek mutation, which has had such a profound impact on western thinking. Even Zeus could think, reason, learn, and improve morally through time.