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Episode 125, the Zoroastrian Bundahishan.

This episode is on the Bundahishan.

This episode is on the Bundahizian, a 9th-century Persian account of how the world was created,

and how the deities of good and evil, or Mazd and Ariman, have been at war with one another ever since. Ancient Eurasian religious allegories are full of tales of brothers,

Kane and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, and more.

And we can imagine Judaism, Christianity, and Islam themselves,

as brother religions descended from a common ancestor.

The Adyan Ibrahimia is they're called in Arabic, sharing the same scriptural traditions.

But the Abrahamic religions have another brother, a half-brother from further to the east.

This half-brother is very possibly older than all of them.

And this half-brother lived closely alongside all of them for a long time, although we, in the English-speaking world hardly ever hear of it. As the Achaemenid Empire and then Hellenistic Empires, and then conquests of the Parthian

Empire, and the conquests of Rome washed back and forth over what is today Syria, Israel, Lebanon,

Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq, the flood tides of east and west dampened this region of the

supercontinent with new layers of people and culture every time. One of those layers from the 500s

BCE onward was Zoroastrianism. We learned a number of episodes ago about the basics of Zoroastrianism.

With a historical epicenter in present-day Iran, Zoroastrianism is an ethical monotheism

rooted in a great contest between the forces of good and the forces of evil, a contest that

takes place in both the material world around

us as well as the unseen world of spirits. Zoroastrians believe that the omniscient god

Ahura Mazda, later known as Ormazd, is currently in a great contest with Angra Maynu, later

...