Lighting The Way Of Faith

Explore the rich history of Zoroastrianism – the world’s first monotheistic faith.

- Sophie Ibbotson

Adam and Eve, if they existed, would have known God in the wonder of the natural world, the earth, the air, and water. Jesus Christ was not a Christian, but a Jew, and he knew better than anyone that God is multifaceted. Although Jewish scholars and theologians name Abraham as the first Jew because he rejected idolatry and recognised one god, the concept of monotheism – which passed from Jews to Christians, and then to Muslims, too – was not something new. Abraham just happened to be the man who made it famous, and whom popular history has recorded as the originator, the first believer.

But before Abraham, and what we know as the three Abrahamic faiths, there were already those who worshipped one god: the Zoroastrians, or Parsis, as many of the modern day adherents of the religion are known. A small community, who traditionally marry amongst themselves and have no doctrinal requirement to proselytise, their history and the tenets of their faith are poorly understood by outsiders. But the impact of their ideas over the past 3,000 years has been nothing short of revolutionary. Zoroastrianism transformed the dominant belief systems from the polytheistic worship of gods representing natural phenomenon, and Mother Earth figures representing fertility and harvest, to the conceptualisation and worship of a single, male god.

The prehistoric roots of Zoroastrianism are to be found in northern Iran, and what is now Azerbaijan, in the early second millennium BC. The faiths of Indo-Iranian peoples at this time typically focused on cosmic mythology, and groups of deities embodying (for example) water and rivers, the sun, spirits, and primordial serpents or dragons. These religious beliefs and rites were closely related to those of Vedism, the forerunner to Hinduism in India; during this early period, there was undoubtedly a cross-fertilisation of concepts between India and Iran.