Course XXVIII - Teaching 9: The Persians

As Aryan civilizations succeeded one another, religions experienced changes, modifications and transformations.
On the basin of the Tigris, in Central Asia, the strong and indomitable Assyrians stayed, and soon they grew up, developed a powerful civilization.
Populous and lost cities of Asur, Ninive and Gale are memorials of this people.
Like the Egyptian people, their great enemy –defeated and victorious at a time– they divinized Nature, the Goddess Dove, that is, their great queen Semiramis, while the worship of the male aspect of God was symbolized by the holy fire constantly burning in temples.
They had to follow a new religion, which really would deify and exalt the divine concept, by depriving it of a lot of idols, statues and several worships.
The Divine Atlantean Religion had been crushed under monstrous statues of numerous gods, and that pure and natural religion of the early Aryans had been substituted for gross forms.
Asur, the winged god emerged from the Solar disc, had lost any harmonious meaning of mankind linked with the Divinity.
On a vast plateau of Asia, surrounded by rivers Indus, Tigris and Caspian Sea, a new was taking form, which was a mixture of Persians, Medes and Assyrians –the Iranian or Persian race.
In the beginning of civilization, Zoroaster, a Great Initiate, descended to them. This Great Being destroyed idolatry and raised the standard of the Great God, the Unique God, the Solar Word: Ahuramazda. Since then, the Solar worship, symbol of the Divine Religion of the Atlanteans, will shine again on any standard, on any throne and altar.
In his youth, Zoroaster is taken by Vohumano, tutelary god of the race, to a high mountain and there Ahuramazda gives him the Avesta, holy code of the new religion.
He established the Iranian religion, the two fundamental tenets about good and evil. Goodness has to be rewarded in this lifetime and in the hereafter; evil has to be punished in this lifetime by the law, and in the hereafter by divine pain and punishment.
Even in death, this new religion deprives itself of many forms, because the corpses of their dead people are exposed on high towers to be devoured by prey birds, and their bones reduced to ashes by the sun.
Iranian religion opens an interlude among Aryan religions that have lost their early harmony based on a monotheistic and polytheistic worship at a time, even though later, and as any religion, the Iranian religion became material y worshiped several gods. All successive religions never lost the true concept of racial religion, which is a divine memory contained in human form.
From Oxus’ and Laxartes’ shores, close to the mystic plateau of Pamir, the Iranians came down toward Bactriana and Nizaya. Empires of Medes and Persians emerged from these numerous nomadic tribes. Until our days and like a dream, stories about important cities of these nations (Ecbatana and Persepolis) come to us.
Their early language was like Zenzar and Sanskrit, and related to the Avesta, a book entirely lost, because the Zend-Avesta was just a commentary about the early text (Zen = commentary).
The religious concept of the Persians is natural and divine. Everything emanated from the Eternal One –from Zervani Akerena. The Non-Manifested One expressed Himself in a manifested god: Ormuzd or Ahuramazda. Also there was a god of evil: Ahriman.
Their concept about life was not of an absolute good or an absolute evil because they had in very high esteem the tenet of pairs of opposites. Ormuzd does not overcome always, but periodically there is an age of good and an age of evil. The one balances the other. But the great god of the Persians is Mitra, image of cosmic energy.
Ormuzd, Ahriman and Mitra form the Holy Trinity. Good and evil fade away, but Divine Energy remains eternally.
This adoration of the Son makes Solar image shine over palaces and standards of the Persians. Iran is totally the city of the god Sun.
Worship of fire emerges as a result of this fervent veneration.
Fire is the only symbol and the only image in this radiant temple of gold.
Priests foretell the future by means of flames on the altar, and the voice of the gods comes from fire. Zarathustra was the Great Prophet of Iran, Divine Incarnation appeared to renew a declined Persian people; one should not mistake this Prophet for Zoroaster, who was the Initiate that guided to the early Iranians from Bactriana to the plateau of Iran.
Persian religion is totally cosmogonic and astrological in relation to its symbol and form. The Sun is abode of the blessed souls; but to go up to him, the souls have to pass through seven doors, which are images of the planets, but also image of initiatic stages to climb in order to achieve their liberation or the state of Solar Initiate.
No evidence remains of Persian civilization and of its enormous progress, since history only knows something from the Sasanides’ dynasty on.
The Persians also have in Persepolis an important library and a museum with texts of the remotest times of the Syrians, which the Greek destroyed under Alexander.
Now Persian religions disappeared totally, but in India there is Mazdeism, which is an image of that ancient religion, the second religion after Hinduism that survives until our days. Even today, a Mazdeistic or Parsi priest kindles the holy fire but does not touch it, put embers on the top of two sticks of sandal to kindle it and, in certain temples, he does not kindle the fire; for years, devotees expect that a lightning from the sky may kindle that fire.
In the antiquity, Persians priests, who had perfectly the elemental entities under control, attracted a lightning from the sky to kindle the fire on the altar.