Original Magic: The Rituals and Initiations of the Persian Magi - Stephen E. Flowers Ph.D. 2017

The Early Zarathustran Age
The History of Iranian Magic

Zarathustra opposed the practice of sorcery and fashioned a true religion that could be valid for any and all peoples based on magical principles and rooted in his profound philosophical insight. Zarathustra probably lived as early as 1700 BCE. This date is supported by linguistic evidence, which shows that the age of the language in which he composed his songs, the Gathas, corresponds approximately to this era. As mentioned above, the Sanskrit Rig Veda, recorded in India, dates roughly from the same period.

Zarathustra was a priest of the archaic Iranian/Indo-European cult. Specifically, he was a zaotar responsible for the recitations of the verbal portions of the ritual of sacrifice. The culture in which he lived was a pastoral one, probably located somewhere in the vicinity of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. There, the aggressive and violent warrior society was demanding excessive animal sacrifices in an effort to assure their continued riches and victory over their enemies. Zarathustra was revolted by these practices and the abuses of the warrior class. In a moment of spiritual crisis he gained a flash of insight in which a revolutionary new way of thinking was revealed to him. He saw that the gods and goddesses were erroneously and superstitiously seen as humanoid or anthropomorphic entities whereas in fact there was only one true divinity or godhead, which was pure abstract consciousness. This he called Ahura Mazda, the Lord Wisdom. The gods of old were reenvisioned under the influence of his insight (daêna) into abstract principles. This was the birth of true philosophy. Zarathustra founded a group of initiates who learned his songs by heart and passed them on in this oral tradition verbatim for centuries. This is the so-called Mazmaga, the “Great Fellowship.” The fact that such an institution exists is proved by the fact that the texts, which reflect an archaic level of language from the middle of the second millennium BCE, were not written down until about two thousand years later—and the old forms of the language were preserved intact without the aid of the written word. Zarathustra was able to convert a king of the eastern Iranian realm, Vishtaspa, and the prophet’s lineage of students continued to reveal his teachings for the next several hundred years. This lineage was the beginning of the Mazmaga.