24 Facts About Zoroaster

Zarathushtra Spitama, more commonly known as Zoroaster or Zarathustra, was an Iranian religious reformer who challenged the tenets of the contemporary Ancient Iranian religion, becoming the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism.

Zoroaster had an impact on Heraclitus, Plato, Pythagoras, and the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Zoroaster spoke an Eastern Iranian language, named Avestan by scholars after the corpus of Zoroastrian religious texts written in that language.

Zoroaster's life is traditionally dated to sometime around the 7th and 6th centuries BC, making him a contemporary of Cyrus the Great, though most scholars, using linguistic and socio-cultural evidence, suggest a dating to somewhere in the second millennium BC.

Zoroaster is credited with authorship of the Gathas as well as the, a series of hymns composed in Old Avestan that cover the core of Zoroastrian thinking.

Some scholars propose that the chronological calculation for Zoroaster was developed by Persian magi in the 4th century BC, and as the early Greeks learned about him from the Achaemenids, this indicates they did not regard him as a contemporary of Cyrus the Great, but as a remote figure.

The birthplace of Zoroaster is unknown, and the language of the Gathas is not similar to the proposed north-western and north-eastern regional dialects of Persia.

Zoroaster is recorded as the son of Pourushaspa of the Spitama family, and Dugdow, while his great-grandfather was Haecataspa.

Zoroaster became a priest probably around the age of 15, and according to Gathas, gaining knowledge from other teachers and personal experience from traveling when he left his parents at age 20.

Zoroaster soon became aware of the existence of two primal spirits, the second being, with opposing concepts of and.

Zoroaster received further revelations and saw a vision of the seven, and his teachings were collected in the and the.

Zoroaster died when he was 77 years and 40 days old.

Sibt ibn al-Jawzi instead stated that some older narration said that Zoroaster was a former disciple of Uzair.

Manichaeism considered Zoroaster to be a figure in a line of prophets of which Mani was the culmination.

Zoroaster appears in the Baha'i Faith as a "Manifestation of God", one of a line of prophets who have progressively revealed the Word of God to a gradually maturing humanity.

Shoghi Effendi, the head of the Baha'i Faith in the first half of the 20th century, saw Baha'u'llah as the fulfillment of a post-Sassanid Zoroastrian prophecy that saw a return of Sassanid emperor Bahram; Effendi stated that Zoroaster lived roughly 1000 years before Jesus.

Zoroaster emphasized the freedom of the individual to choose right or wrong and individual responsibility for one's deeds.

Zoroaster is rarely depicted as looking directly at the viewer; instead, he appears to be looking slightly upwards, as if beseeching.

Zoroaster is almost always depicted with a beard along with other factors bearing similarities to 19th-century portraits of Jesus.

Many modern depictions of Zoroaster derive from a Sassanid-era rock-face carving at Taq-e Bostan.

The framework is a retelling of Plato's Myth of Er, with Zoroaster taking the place of the original hero.

Later, an even more elaborate mythoetymology evolved: Zoroaster died by the living flux of fire from the star which he himself had invoked, and even, that the stars killed him in revenge for having been restrained by him.

Pliny's 2nd- or 3rd-century attribution of "two million lines" to Zoroaster suggest that a formidable pseudepigraphic corpus once existed at the Library of Alexandria.

Pliny records that Zoroaster's head had pulsated so strongly that it repelled the hand when laid upon it, a presage of his future wisdom.