Me as the Battlefield Between Ahriman and Ahura Mazda

Posted on December 15, 2002 in Myths & Mysticism

I love my God because he gives me the freedom to deny him. — Tagore

I seized the opportunity to read up more on Zoroastrian mythology. It’s incredible how much of this religion crept into Christianity and polluted the earlier ideas about the nature of God and the universe. The reader who wanted to know about Satan probably doesn’t realize the degree to which her/his version of Christian faith has been distorted by the ideas of this other religion. I’ll probably get around to making a list of concepts, “fulfillments of prophecy”, and chracters that sneaked into the Bible, especially the Gospel of Matthew and the Revelation. For now, let this suffice:

We’re all battlefields. Good and Evil go at it in each of us. Evil is all that is a lie and unclean. So what’s been happening to me, according to Zoroastrian teaching is that the forces of Evil (led by the Arch-Demon Ahriman) are flinging everything they can at me: mental illness, gout, asthma, nasty people, blog roaches, joblessness, comuter crashes, etc. because they want me to lie. They want me to say that Ahura Mazda is no darn good.

It’s this philosophy that led to the corrupted, nonBiblical version of Satan that the poster evidentally believes in, contrary to the being depicted in Job. About the time Christianity was making its rounds, an offshoot of Zoroastrianism called Mithraism was making the rounds in the Roman Empire, too. It was damned popular. Like rival companies trying to corner a market, the two religions copied ideas from one another. “See, we have a last battle too!” the Christians cried after Revelation became part of the Bible. “We’ve got evil! We’ve got a notion of clean and unclean! Join us!” The trump card for Christianity, interestingly, was that it allowed women to take part in rites. Mithraic rites took place in underground chambers and only men could participate. With half the Empire excluded, Mithraism was, like male-only country clubs, doomed.

I like the Job version of God, though it has another problem: that God and his angels see people as playthings. That’s getting more like East Indian concepts of God, e.g. Ganesha, but I can write about that another time.

In any case, I don’t care who is responsible for this mess. CLEAN IT UP!