throughout the year, so that they may help Him in his great struggle…”
Though we never asked him to, Gobares then went into the details of his ritual. The proper observance, he said, is made five times a day, at midnight, sunrise, noon, afternoon, and sunset. Most commonly, it is made by standing before the flame and reciting a short prayer handed down from the prophet himself. The prayer is an affirmation of the Creator’s power that, Gobares said, will aid Him in his struggle with the Hostile Spirit, Angra Mainyu-May-His-Name-Be-Forever-Accursed. It is not recited out of any vain desire to satisfy the worshipper’s needs, but to do the work of driving evil from Creation, until the day when the work of the Hostile Spirit has been expunged utterly, and what he called the ‘Third Time’ begins. As Gobares explained this, he pretended to untie his rope, and as he spoke of the Hostile Spirit, he snapped the ends of it, as if he was lashing Angra Mainyu.
His people had many other strange beliefs. They attributed to that single god, Ahuramazda, the creation of both the spiritual and physical world. They held that men would be judged for the rightness of their actions after death by a great weighing of all they had said, done, and thought. That is because, according to the Zoroastrians, good words, deeds, and thoughts are not the mere private business of individuals, but all have influence on the universal struggle against disorder. If the good side of the scale was heavier the deceased proceeded to a kind of Persian garden, or pairi-daeza in the old tongue of their prophet. If the bad side prevailed, the dead was cast into a chasm that was like Hades, only worse, where Angra Mainyu ruled.
At some future time there would come an ultimate triumph over evil when the bones of the interred dead would rise up and be reunited with their souls. The last battle against the minions of the Hostile Spirit would then be led by the savior named Saoshyant. He would be a mortal man, but would be born of a virgin mother after she bathed in a blessed lake containing Zoroaster’s seed. Upon his victory would commence a Final Judgment, where the resurrected bodies of all who had ever lived would be forced to swim a river of molten iron. To the righteous this ordeal would seem like bathing in mother’s milk, while the not-so-good would suffer the flesh seared from their bones. The torrent would then wash the rejects down to Hell where they, Angra Mainyu, and all his daevas would be finally annihilated. With their destruction would commence the ‘Third Time,’ when all the mortals of the earth would consume haoma for the last time, attain immortality, and realize eternal happiness.
Gobares continued: “Zarathustra did not have great success at first in enlightening his neighbors. After years invested in teaching them, all except one rejected the truth. His single success, the first Zoroastrian besides the prophet, was Zarathustra’s own cousin. The prophet made many more converts later, when he preached among strangers. Today his truth has been accepted by men from Africa to India and, if I might say, in your country as well.”
Craterus was fuming before Gobares was finished.
“Are these the beliefs of adult men, or of children? Really, do you honestly believe that your prayers, personally, will affect the planets in their courses? What arrogance! And do you believe that the gods care for the individual fates of such insignificant creatures as ourselves? What do we care for the fates of ants, though ants are far closer to us than we are to your omnipotent Creator! Really, I’m surprised even Zoroaster’s cousin believed him!”
“I have heard these beliefs before, among the Jews in Syria,” observed Ptolemy.
“The Jews,” replied the unflappable Gobares, “imbibed the teachings of Zoroaster during their captivity in Babylon. When Cyrus the Great allowed them to return to their homelands, they took this wisdom to the west with them.”
“Let the Jews and other slaves delude themselves with tales of virgin births and lakes of fire and dead souls rising!” Craterus scoffed.
Alexander took his chin from his hand, where it had been resting as he pondered the implications of what he had heard. We all looked at him when he spoke.
“There is nobility in believing in a just god. Our Olympians are too much reflections of ourselves, are they not? They do not compel us to be good.”
“Is compelled good any good at all?” asked Hephaestion.
“Perhaps not. But that does not concern me as much as this: there is no place for my father Ammon in your story, Gobares.”
The old man nodded as if to agree. But he was not done.
“Perhaps, O King, you will see something of yourselves in the truth of the Creation. The world began as a thought in the mind of Ahuramazda, the eternal and uncreated one, and the first manifestation of this thought was a spiritual world. With this stage appeared the spirits of all the beings that would later appear as material things: the spirits of the air and the earth, of the Single Plant and the Single Animal, and of First Man. And because the spirits were not yet admixed with their physical forms, Ahuramazda’s first creation was not subject to flaw.
“Yet He was not satisfied by the spiritual world, splendid as it was, because in its perfection there could be no change, and without change there could be no virtue. And so Ahuramazda with his will gave birth to Time, and his son Time, in his turn, begat the Amesha Spentas, the Sacred Immortals. Each of these Immortals was responsible for one of the seven lesser Creations. Sky appeared as a great stone sphere into which the second Creation, Water, was poured. And floating upon Water, like the froth strung upon the sea, appeared the Earth. The fourth, fifth, and sixth lesser Creations were the physical manifestations of Single Plant, Single Animal, and First Man, who lived on the earth, and with the blessing of Time, ramified into all the types and tribes we see today. The last and most important Creation was Fire, for it is the link between the two worlds of the Great Creation, through which the spirits may animate the physical bodies while they live.”
“And does this wisdom explain why you all wash in cow piss?” interjected Craterus, laughing.
“Upon the completion of Second Creation it was perfect,” said Gobares. “But it was also subject to imperfection because it existed as a physical thing. In that instant, before First Man took a single breath, the Hostile Spirit, likewise uncreated, launched his attack. He burst through the stone sphere of the Sky, making the hole we see at those times when the Sun or Moon disappear from view. Plunging down, he landed in the sea, and churned it up with storms, and turned it bitter to taste with the salt of his sweat. And striding out on the Earth, he plucked the Sun from the sky and grazed the land with it, scorching all the many forms of Single Plant. These places are now desert. And places that were not scorched were afflicted by swarms of insects, or the brown of withering, so that the principle of Fire could no longer hold spirit and matter together, or only for a short time in each case. Thus mortality appeared in the world…”
“And so,” asked Alexander, “may we say that Ahuramazda ran a risk when he decided to make a material world, because his creation could be attacked?”
“Yes, that is true. Among some herbads, or priests, Ahuramazda is called ‘the god who risked.’ Yet witness the wonder of His handiwork, as the people of the Good Faith, as we call ourselves, take every one of the Six Creations to be holy. All water is holy, all metal, all plants and animals, all fire, all men-not just this one plant here, or that one man there. All merit our reverence, and in accord with His revealed word, we take all the world as our temple.”
Listening to Gobares, this seemed to me a naive way of thinking, to take everyone and everything to be sacred. If all is worthy of worship then nothing is, I thought. But later I came to observe the basic gentleness of these so-called people of the Good Faith. Their discipline and humility is remarked all around the lands of the Great King. In Babylon I heard a saying that attested to the trust they earned: “Fight by the side of a Greek, eat in the house of a Jew, but sleep under the roof of a Zoroastrian.” Their decency is obvious to anyone walking through the narrow alleys of a Persian village. Where in Greek towns we must dodge sewage dumped from windows, Zoroastrian women set pans of embers sprinkled with marjoram on their doorsteps, to perfume the air for all who must breathe.
“The Great Enemy then visited his predations on First Animal, slaying the Uniquely-created Bull. Angra Mainyu then sought out First Man. He found him sitting in a garden, completely unafraid because he had never known harm in the unmixed Creation. ‘Who are you?’ asked First Man, in his innocence. ‘I am a teacher of a different kind,’ replied the Hostile Spirit. And with that he set upon First Man as his corrupter, appearing to him as a beautiful woman. First Man, who was curious, approached Woman as a child might, without fear, as the Hostile Spirit afflicted him with temptation beyond his experience. Stirred in that way for the first time, he pushed inside the womb of Angra Mainyu. The Hostile Spirit made First Man’s progress inside him smooth, like a woman who was willing, but cold and hard, as if he lay with a figure of polished marble. In that instant Fear was born in First Man. With fear came doubt. With further generations, doubt feasted on the minds of men, making them forget the truth of Ahuramazda’s supremacy. Some of these doubters became the agents of the Hostile Spirit. Corrupted, they are
