Philosophers, Mystics, and, Poets; or

The Near East in the Mind of Armenia.

Lecture Three

James R. Russell,

Harvard Univ.,

Cambridge, Mass.

3. Iran.

His majesty Yazdagerd, king of kings of Iran and non-Iran, progeny of the gods, was just fed up. Let us leave him for a moment in his throne room at Ctesiphon and look at the world as it was in the mid-fifth century A.D. For hundreds of years humanity had looked at the universe with two eyes: Persian and Greek. Herodotus had noted some strange Persian customs, but his attitude was, It is a traditional practice, so let them do it. And anyway, if the kings of Egypt or Iran were fond of incest, the Greeks liked boys. Persian custom frowned on this, but once the Persians tried it, they took to it; and anyway their judges were smart enough in such cases to rule that even if there is a law that prohibits something or other, there is another one which says the king of kings can do whatever he pleases. So for centuries the two world-empires squabbled amicably: the Romans, never averse to a new luxury or philosophy, enriched the Parthian merchants by buying up diaphanous cloth and silk brocade as fast as it could be delivered to Antioch. In Iranized Anatolia they co-opted the cult of Mithra, a divinity connected to justice, covenants, and the sun who seems to have served as a kind of rallying point against Roman imperialism and ended up being the Roman army's most popular object of worship. The Iranians hired Greek actors and artists and declared on their coins that they were philhellenes. Believing earth to be holy and death to be an unmitigated evil, they continued as they had always done to expose corpses on rocks to be safely eaten up by wild animals. Some Greeks on a journey to the East once saw such a corpse lying there, and, being pious and good hearted people with a healthy respect for the proper rites due the dead, buried it. Then they made camp. The next morning they got up to find, to their surprise, that the corpse had been dug up and put back where it had been, doubtless by some equally pious Persian. "Whatever," muttered the travellers, more or less, in Attic Greek. They went on their way. Ships that pass in the night. The world worked.Vive la différence.

Iran had many religions anyway: the main one was called the Religion of Worship of the Lord Wisdom, Ahura Mazda. But actually "religion" and "worship" are inexact translations. Daena, the word from which comes the Arabic din, really means "vision," that is, spiritual perception or insight. The idea is that you perceive a cosmic truth yourself and then choose freely to adhere to it in thought and practice, accepting the consequences. ("What is Religion?" asks a Middle Persian maxim. "It is that which one habitually does.") A Greek philosopher would have understood the concept– and anyway ancient Greek has no word equivalent to the modern term "religion," either. Then, as to worship, the Iranian term yasna really means an act of sacrifice. Sacrifice, according to the ancient Indo-Iranian understanding of the world, is part of a circular process: the divine world provides cattle on earth, which herdsmen take care of. Men and beasts are defended by soldiers and kings, who provide for priests. The priests chant sacred words to attract the interest and attention of the divinities, whom they then nourish with the energy released by the offering of a sacrifice. The gods are then able and inclined to send more cattle, and the world stays in a kind of right balance, informed by cosmic truth and justice, called arta. (The Armenians use a cognate term in the word ardar, meaning "just;" and a host of Iranian names in Armenian, Artavan, Artavazd, etc., include the term.) So the Persian religion was the daena of yasna of Mazda. In Armenian, deni mazdezn. It is a special point that the Iranians called the supreme creator of the Universe not God (a German word meaning "he who receives libations"), for instance, nor the Great Unknowable, nor Zeus the Thunderer. He is Wisdom, kind and good and a friend to His creations. The author of this puzzling idea was a lone poetic genius and visionary named Zarathushtra, about whom more in a bit.

The Greeks heard his name pronounced something like Zoroaster, and since they had a vague idea that he had been a primordial philosopher and physicist, something like one of their Presocratics, they figured the second half of his name was their word aster, "star," and that he was the inventor of astronomy and astrology. Pythagoras and his gang had been able to do all sorts of mystical, shamanistic things, also; so accordingly the Greeks figured Zoroaster had taught his followers, the Magi, to do the same– out of this comes our word magic. Never mind for now that the second part of the Prophet's name, -ushtra, means "camel," like modern Persian shotor; or that magu- meant something like "the sharer of a gift." Zoroaster inspired profound respect. Since the Iranians honorifically bestowed the names of places where he had lived and worked on new settlements, much as Americans have a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the idea gradually evolved that Zoroaster had been born in northwestern Iran– in Armenia, in fact. Armenia was the closest part of Iran to Greece. The Zoroastrian priests, the Magi, were supposed to be able with the help of certain hallucinogenic preparations to depart their earthly bodies and visit the next world in search of esoteric knowledge: there is a famous text about a righteous man named Viraz who did this. The pre-Christian Armenians adapted the story to an existing myth about their legendary king Ara the Beautiful, about whom the Christian historian Movses Khorenats'i provides a much abbreviated and distorted narrative. But Greece received the full Zoroastrian version, significantly through an Armenian intermediary; so the myth of Er, son of Armenios, crowns the argument of Plato's great treatise on the soul, The Republic, in its tenth book. And anyhow, to this day a river in Armenia is called Hrazdan, from Frazdanu, the name of a lake on whose shores Zoroaster had made the first royal convert to his new religion. On the banks of the Frazdanu rose a network of Urartean fortresses, one of which, Erebuni, gave its name to a later Armenian town, Erevan, which was possibly then misunderstood to be an Iranian word meaning "rich," which is an epithet of Ahura Mazda. There is a whole province called Bagrevand, meaning "God is Rich," in Armenia, so the mistake can be forgiven. The Armenians in turn thought their name for the Prophet, Zradasht, "Zoroaster," meant zoravor ukht, "mighty words," this itself an expression composed entirely of Iranian loan-words (which account for about seventy percent of Armenian). This could have had to do with his great hymns, the Gathas, or with other words of power, manthras, that he pronounced. But it is difficult to tell what this explanation, perhaps a fragment of lost Armenian Mazdaean exegesis, really implied.

This Persian religion is called Zoroastrianism, which is wrong on several counts: the name of the Prophet is given in its inaccurate Greek, and he is made the focus of the faith he propounded. Since the Iranians called themselves zarathushtri-, "followers of Zoroaster," as well as "Mazda-worshippers," it is not as egregious a misunderstanding as calling Moslems Mohammedans. (Theword "Jew" sounds so unpleasant, having been a Christian term of abuse for two millennia, that for a time it was polite to call us gentlemen of the Mosaic persuasion, which means Moses but sounds more as though one has been convinced that one simply must decorate the floor of one's dining room with a picture made of tiny colored pieces of stone.) The Iranians who abandoned their ancestral faith for Islam called those who had not atesh-parast, "fire-worshippers–" since the (literal) focus and emblem of Iranian devotion is living light and warmth, rather than, say, a black stone cube or a wooden instrument of painful and prolonged execution. Since their Prophet taught them that one must come to true vision oneself, and since the imperial Persians had observed that non-Iranians were insufficiently noble and intelligent to do this anyway, they did not propagate their faith amongst the nations they ruled. It was tolerant, in the way that people who accept the inevitable diversity of human ways tend to be; it was also aristocratic. So in Iran there were also Buddhists, worshippers of Shiva and other Indian divinities, and Jews. The latter liked Iranian tolerance and perceived some points of similarity to their own faith; so the prophet Isaiah declared the Persian king Cyrus God's anointed, that is, a messiah, in passages that paraphrase Zarathushtra's Gathas. Later, in the years following Rome's conquest of Israel, there was a belief around that Iranian reconquest of the country would be the first sign of the advent of the Messiah– the Big one.

And then there were Christians. The Church of Persia was the world's second largest, and until the Roman Empire became Christian also this did not matter much. The Iranians regarded life as a gift, not a burden– and one to be enjoyed. Poetry and music, food and drink, and of course sex (though not, technically speaking, with boys– the entire corpus of Persian love lyric notwithstanding), were meant to be enjoyed in moderation. Moderation, the Magi argued, as they used the Aristotelian moral yardstick to evaluate life, is not the midpoint between good and evil, but the right amount of good between excess and deficiency. So they were quite unable to fathom why anybody should insist God had created a good world, yet practice celibacy and asceticism and go around being penitentially lachrymose. It was stupid, just like worshipping a hanged slave was stupid, or, for that matter, saying that God said "Let there be light!" Was this God eternal? wondered the Magi, and if so, since he had to be, to be God, what did He do before He said that, sit around in the dark? It was all stupid, like taking every seventh day off because after creating the world for six days God had rested on the seventh one. As though the source of all energy could be tired. But the Jews downed tools on Friday evening, 'erev Shabbat (which, via Aramaic, became Armenian urbat', "Friday"), and the Christians, just to be different, took off Sunday. The Persians had no weeks, just a month of thirty days, each named after an angelic or divine being, but they ended up with more holidays anyway– all of them cheerful. In the third century A.D. the Sasanian house overthrew the Arsacid Parthian one. The Rabbis thought the coup d'état portended no good, but for Jews worrying is a survival reflex. In fact, things changed less, or at least far more slowly, than historical tradition is wont to represent to us. Parthia corresponded to today's Khorasan province, in northeastern Iran; and Persia is simply Fars (that is, Pars– Arabs can't say "p" and since they came in the seventh century A.D. this is just one of the many unpleasant innovations they have introduced), in the southwest. The dialects of the two regions were mutually intelligible; and the Sasanians, though they tightened the state apparatus and greatly augmented the temple bureaucracy, generally let the local nobility alone.

The Armenian kings were Arsacid Parthians, and, Agathangelos tells us, they immediately went to war against the usurper, ravaging all Persia, he says. The mosquito in the anecdote spent all afternoon thinking he was raping an elephant. Anyway, this was A.D. 226 and the Armenian Arsacids were allowed to stay on their throne till A.D. 429, so the Sasanians cannot have felt a corresponding animosity. Gregory the Illuminator was Trdat the Great's cousin, and his descendants, right down to Nerses the Graceful in the twelfth century, reigned as Patriarchs of the Armenian Church. (Nerses is the name of a minor Zoroastrian divinity, Nairyosangha, "he of manly utterance," who is a divine messenger, a kind of Hermes-figure.) Since the first Arsacids had begun their rebellion against the Seleucids in 250 B.C., it is not a bad run, and a lot longer than the era of the poor Sasanians themselves. Christianity existed in Armenia, as elsewhere; and when the king himself converted, the Sasanians probably regarded the act without much alarm. After all, Edessa, "daughter of the Parthians," was Christian; Mihrshah, ruler of the petty kingdom of Mesene, on the Persian Gulf, had toyed with the new Gnostic religion of Manichaeism; and in Bactria and Sogdia, to the east, the local rulers, from what we can gather of such relics as coins and the remnants of temples, tried mixing a little of everything. In faraway Sogdian Samarkand, there was even a "Christian Apostolic Church": tarsakane patghambariminch hanchaman. Tarsak, literally "(God-)fearer," is an early term for a Christian, imported by Persians into Central Asia. Hanchaman, modern Persian anjoman, is "congregation;" the word existed in Classical Armenia as hanjmni (locative singular), but ekelets'i, from Greek ekklesia, replaced it. As for patghambar, minus the suffix, it's Armenian patgamavor, "delegate," or, more grandly, Turco-Persian paygambar, "prophet."When Rome became Christian, though, and Persian Christian converts like the Syriac-speaking theologian Aphrahat (i.e., Farhad) began exhorting their congregations to vandalize fire-temples and assist the military victory of Byzantium, king Shapur II reacted with understandable severity in his alarm. In the Great Persecution of the late 330's, some 35,000 Christians were executed. Shapur also went to war against the Armenian Arshak II: many of the Armenian nobles openly opposed their king and had to be reminded by their Patriarch, Nerses, that they owed their hereditary posts at court to the Arsacids. But some, like Meruzhan Artsruni, gave up Christianity and returned to the Zoroastrian faith. P'awstos, the principal chronicler of the events, portrays him and the others as traitors and cowards. The Sasanians did not really know how to deal with the new, evangelistic religion, and tended to react rather than to initiate. The Christians rejoiced in their deaths, calling the experience martyrdom: a Zoroastrian cannot go that far, but the high priest Adurbad i Amahraspandan underwent the fearful ordeal of having molten metal poured over his breast, in testimony to the truth of his own beliefs, which, in imitation of the Nicene Creed, he framed in a credo in the living Middle Persian language. Around the time Mashtots invented the Armenian alphabet, the Sasanians created one for their holy book, the Avesta. Its principles, and a few of the letters, are suspiciously similar to Armenian. In the early fifth century, Yazdagerd I tried a policy of amity with Christians, for which posterity rewarded him with the epithet "the Sinner."

So we are back to Yazdegerd II. Iran was fighting hard but successfully on its eastern frontier. The Armenian Arsacid house had fallen, thanks largely to the earnest efforts of the Armenian nakharars. Byzantium was at war in the West. Maybe the Persians did not see this in all its theological nicety, but the Armenian and Greek Christians were beginning to show signs of strain with each other's ideas about whether Christ was of one nature or two. Yazdegerd, if we are to accept Elishe vardapet's description of him, was a man given to bursts of temper. His prime minister, Mihrnarseh, was wealthy and influential: an inscription recording his construction of a bridge for the public good, not far from the royal palace complex of Firuzabad, still survives. (The bridge itself doesn't, but I saw big chunks of it lying on the riverbank, from the Shiraz-Kazerun highway. Further along that highway is the vast ruined city of Bishapur, and the rock reliefs of the early Sasanians, commemorating their triumphs over the Roman emperors, frame the leafy gorge of the Shapur river. On a late summer day in the year 2000, I swam from one relief to the next, and then my Persian friends served a picnic dinner of lavash, feta cheese, and tomatoes, with watermelon for dessert.)

Mihrnarseh suggested this was an opportune time to invite the non-Zoroastrian peoples of the empire to embrace the Weh Den, the Good Religion. The Jews were told to stop taking Saturdays off. There was something of a problem with Hanuka menorot, the eight-branched lamps commemorating the Maccabean revolt and its miraculous outcome. These are displayed by Jews in windows, and apparently Persians, anxious lest anyone breathe on a sacred flame, would remove them. A Persian burst into the room of some dying sage, snatched the oil lamp at the head of his bed, and ran away, plunging the room into darkness, eliciting some irritable remarks from the great rabbi before his departure to the academy on high. But although the Jews would occasionally try to emigrate en masse to Jerusalem in expectation of some messianic fulfillment, they had no external loyalties. It was Christians who were the main target of the new policy. In a letter to the Armenians, he and the Magi observed that Christian celibacy merely serves the purposes of the evil spirit, Ahreman, who wishes to depopulate the world. The Armenians sent back a sarcastic reply, refusing. If you think this is old news, consider that the reverse side of the Armentel phone card bears a painstakingly exact copy of Yeghvard Isabekyan's painting Pataskhan Hazkertin, "The Reply to Yazdegerd," which is modelled upon the Russian painter Ilya Repin's "The Zaporozhye Cossacks Composing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan." The Armenians on Isabekyan's canvas look earnest, serious, and resolute, it is true; but in the Russian prototype the witty deacon has just penned something quite outrageous, probably a vivid suggestion to the Ottoman Sultan of some acrobatics he is invited to perform with his Queen Mother and assorted Janissaries, and the Ukrainians roundabout are cracking up in hysterics. The point is that, even if the epistolary exchange of tradition never took place, the confrontation, and refusal, and rebellion, were all real, and they have become for Armenians an icon of heroism and of spiritual and political struggle.

This is the point where we stopped at the end of the second lecture: Vardan Mamikonean and his men have explained that their earthly bodies are at the Shah's service, but their souls belong to Christ; and we have seen how Elishe has cited a Hermetic text to explain the nature of spiritual immortality and freedom. Half the Armenian nakharars went over to Yazdagerd's side, and Avarayr was a military victory for Iran, but in the long run it didn't matter: after years of guerrilla war, the treaty of Nvarsak in 484 assured Armenia's status as a Christian province in the empire. Thereafter, that was essentially the undisturbed status quo, till the seventh century, when Byzantium and the Sasanians became locked in a generation-long world war whose theatre was the entire Near East, from Egypt and Constantinople in the south and west to Armenia and Mesopotamia in the East. Both empires, bankrupt and enervated, fell before the new third power of the Arabs and Islam. Christendom recovered, though it took three centuries; Iran did not. The Zoroastrians, whose status as a protected "People of the Book" was never precisely established, given the vagueness of the Qur'an on the majusis, the Magians, gradually converted to Islam, or fled the country for India, where their descendants are the Parsis of modern Gujarat and Bombay. Others subsisted in conditions of extreme degradation in their own land, gradually reduced by destitution, forced conversion, and occasional massacre to little rural strongholds in Yazd and Kerman– the heartland of Iran. A very few seem to have gone west instead of southeast, migrating into the Armenian mountain fastnesses: the historian T'ovma Artsruni mentions meeting refugees from distant Zabolestan– in modern Afghanistan– who claimed descent, not from Adam and Eve, but from a "herder of camels." This could perhaps be an explanation of the name Zarathushtra. But all trace of them is lost. In Armenia itself there existed till modern times the community of the Arevordik', "Children of the Sun," Zoroastrians whose rites and beliefs are similar in many ways to those of the similarly isolated Magousaioi, or Magians, of Cappadocian, whom St. Basil described in the fourth century in a letter to a friend. St. Nerses Shnorhali himself presided over the conversion of some Arevordik' in Samosata to Christianity, and it is to him that we owe the most detailed description of them.

He himself once overheard his guards at Hromkla singing hymns to the rising Sun– a very Zoroastrian thing to do– and wrote some Christian songs, with appropriate verses from the Psalms, to replace them. Pilgrims sang these down to our days. But I like to think the Parthian sun shone, too, in the luminous Christian soul of St. Nerses, when he wrote the hymn of the Arevagal, the Sunrise Office: Luys, ararich' luso, arrajin luys, bnakeald i luys anmatuyts', Hayr erknavor, i dasuts' luseghinats'n orhneal, i tsagel luso arravotus, tsagea i hogis mer zluys k'o imanali. "Light, Creator of Light, primeval Light, Thou Who Dwellest in unapproachable Light, Father in Heaven, blessed by the heavenly battalions of Light, at the dawning of this morning's Light, let shine in our souls Thy Intelligible Light." No one meditating on this song could ever entertain the doubtful thought that God might have dwelt once in the dark. And the base of the word imanali, "intelligible," is the same as that of Mazda. Nor would anyone looking at the sunburst often placed at the center of an Armenian cross ever mistake the object of Armenian Christian worship for a hanged slave. In early times, Armenian crosses were even carved atop stone wings– a purely Zoroastrian symbol of divinity.

Had Yazdegerd looked at Armenian Christianity closely, he might have seen much that was familiar, in fact. The words for books and buildings and vestments– avetaran, tachar, patmuchan and k'ustik– all Iranian. Avetaran, "Gospel." from *abiyadadana, meaning literally a collection of recollections, resonates with the Zoroastrian recitations of sacred history in epic called ayadgar, "memorial." Tachar, a cathedral, was the word the Achaemenid kings of the fifth century B.C. used for their palace at Persepolis. Patmuchan, a priest's robe, is Parthian for any garment; but mediaeval Armenian k'ustik, literally something one ties around one's waist or side, is a very specific term indeed. To this day, a Zoroastrian child becomes a full member of the faith by tying the kusti, a linen belt to be worn at all times in signification of service to Mazda and readiness to fight against Ahriman. There is more than this: the Armenian celebration of the Presentation of our Lord to the Temple, Tearrnendarraj, involves leaping over a bonfire kindled with a candle from inside the church whose name, Melet or the like, comes from a form merrelots', "(names) of the dead." It takes place in the month Ahekan. This word is simply ancient Iranian Athrakana, "Fire month," the time when fire from inside the fire-temple was kindled and the names of the departed were read. They were the fravashis, the mighty protective spirits of the blessed, and their name, too, is preserved in the Armenian month-name Hrotits', genitive plural of *hrort, that is, *fravarti, an Old Persian form of fravashi. One could compare the Armenian observance to the Candlemas of various peoples, but the Iranian tags make it very specific. Similarly, there mare many analogues to the Armenian custom of fortune-telling, vichakakhagh, on Assumption eve. Even if vichak, "lot," were not itself an Iranian word (as most Armenian words are), we would still have the flower used in the rite, called horot-morot, which is put in water. It bears the name of Haurvatat and Ameretat, or Khordad and Amurdad, the Zoroastrian spiritual divinities who preside over plants and water. In its symbolism of light, its vocabulary, its folk rituals, and a great deal else, Armenian Christianity demonstrates an Iranian substratum so strong and so ubiquitous that if Iran had become Christian instead of Moslem, its form of the faith would be very like that which has survived in Armenia. When Armenian Romantics in the late 19th century attempted to revive the spirit of the pagan past, it was an Iranian one they unwittingly evoked. Poets sang of the Zoroastrian goddess Anahit and the god Vahagn (that is, Verethraghna). One journal was named Mehean (literally, "place of Mithra," from *mithriyana); another, Bagin– Parthian for a shrine, literally "place of the god."

Till 1875, it was thought Armenian was an Iranian language. Heinrich Hübschmann demonstrated that the grammar and core vocabulary of Armenian are not Iranian but Thraco-Phrygian. The Iranian component of the language is entirely borrowed, mostly from Parthian and northwest Middle Iranian dialects, but also from New, Middle, and Old Persian. The Armenian nakharar and royal families were Parthians, for the most part; and there was intermarriage with Persians and Alans (modern Ossetes, a northern Iranian group). The Armenians call the Kurds, who are the Iranians of the Armenian plateau, mar, that is, "Medes;" and the latter have inhabited Armenia for thousands of years, if we are to believe Khorenats'i. So Armenians are entitled to regard themselves as an Iranian people, by any reasonable measure, if they wish to. But of course no one does, since the relation to Iran is somewhat analogous to that with Greece discussed in the second lecture– that of the uncomfortably near and intimate alien. But the word Iran itself comes from Aryanam, "(Country) of the Aryas." The latter word is Indo-Iranian and means means "noble" (it is loaned into Armenian as ari); and it is properly applied to speakers of the languages kin to Persian and Hindi. In Armenia, that would mean Kurds and Gypsies. But if Iran is one thing, Aryan is another, even though it isn't– because it came to be misused, as we know, sadly, to signify not a linguistic group, but a racial one. This inaccurate concept was attractive to Europeans for a variety of reasons. First of all, Christians had never been happy with the fact that their god was a Jew; and from the Renaissance on, the revival of Classical studies and the growth of secularism persuaded many people that Christianity itself was not only an unhealthy fiction, but not even one's own, or the oldest available. There was all Greco-Roman antiquity, and Egypt, and that ancient sage Zoroaster besides. Through the eighteenth century, interest in the latter figure grew; and at the end of that century Sir William Jones established the kinship and antiquity of the Indo-European languages: from the Sanskrit of the Vedas and the Avestan of Zarathushtra's Gathas to Greek and Latin, there was one linguistic family, with many features of an underlying culture besides. In the nineteenth century, the great advances in the physical sciences, culminating, one might suggest, in Darwin's investigations into the origin of species, dethroned religion itself and favored the development of racial theory. Most of this happened in Europe, and the result was the invention of the Aryan race (meaning northern European white folks) and Semites (meaning the local Jews). Wilhelm Marr invented a new word for the program of biological solution of Germany's troubles: anti-Semitism.

There are two reasons that Iranian studies is no longer in the mainstream of cultural and accademic interest on a par with Greece or India, as it once was. The first is that Iran is now Moslem, and Europeans feel an instinctive dislike for Islam, except, perhaps, when it is involved in the murder of Israelis and Americans. The second is that the Nazis made the field slightly disreputable by championing it so enthusiastically. Zarathushtra was supposed to be an Aryan prophet, you see; and the fascists easily appropriated to their own use the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra, "Thus Spake Zarathustra," with its doctrine of the Übermensch, the Superman. In his recent book, In Search of Zarathustra, Paul Kriwaczek, cites the German philosopher's assertion that the Iranian prophet had been "the first to see in thi(e) struggle between good and evil the essential wheel in the working of things." But Nietzsche felt the conventional idea of the opposition of good and evil was a constricting moralism, an excuse for denial of human and freedom and worse. In fact he regarded anti-Semitism itself as the worst example of one group of people– the Germans, for whom he reserved his deepest contempt– ignorantly demonizing another. "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman, a rope over an abyss," wrote Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. In the twentieth century, the tightrope walker dived in.

Plenty followed the Aryan fallacy into the same inferno, including Armenians, even though Armenians proved to be the first victims of modern, scientific mass murder. Thus, a writer in the Constantinople journal Mehean, mentioned above, wrote on the eve of the First World War that Christ had been an Aryan. On the eve of the Second World War, having evidently learnt nothing from the experiences of his own people in the First, Professor Artashes Abeghian of Munich University wrote a book approving of Nazi racial theories, attempting to show Armenians were Aryans. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnakts'ut'iun) in America at the same time praised German fascism and Nazi anti-Semitism and racial persecution in its newspaper, Hayrenik; and sponsored the Ts'eghakron, or "Race-Worship" society for young Armenians. General Drastamat ("Dro") Kanayan and Garegin Nzhdeh, both Dashnak heroes today, commanded units in Hitler's army through the war. Since the Dashnaks were anti-Soviet, they were able, like so many other Nazi collaborators, to get off scot-free when the Cold War began and the Soviet Union was declared the new enemy. Dashnak ideology still thrives, in the depraved political climate of countries like Lebanon and Syria; and the opening of Transcaucasian Armenia has enabled the Dashnaks to infect the new republic, as well, with their creed of chauvinism and hatred. There is more and more of it in America, too, and as is so often the case in human affairs, the response has been to deny or underestimate the problem rather than deal with it head on. So what began as a minor issue has been allowed to become a large one.

We can see how the rediscovery of the nearly-forgotten antiquities of Iran and the ensuing development of Iranian studies in the modern period did not happen in a social vacuum, how ideology and the misuse of the scientific method intersected with scholarship and co-opted it, often with terrible consequences from which humanity has not recovered. But from the midst of this I still want to extract a man named Zarathushtra, to look at him as clearly as the evidence allows, and to consider how a particularly important facet of the Iranian heritage, refracted through him, became essential to Armenian culture and remained within it, finding one means of expression when another was denied, enduring. Zarathushtra: the name means something like "elder camel," the one trusted to lead the caravan. His father, Pourushaspa, meaning "owner of many horses," and his mother, Dughdhova, meaning "milkmaid," lived probably in the mid-second millennium B.C., probably in what is now Kazakhstan. They practiced a religion akin to the Hinduism of the Vedas, spoke a language likewise related– the most ancient known form of Iranian, for which we use the name Avestan, after the Scripture of which Zarathushtra'a hymns form the core. The society was one of semi-nomadic pastoralists; the boy was trained as a priest. At the age of twenty he had a spiritual crisis: why should the cosmic order as his people knew it allow evil to thrive? He wandered ten years, and then had a great cosmic revelation, which he relates in the intricate hymns called the Gathas. It is this: there are two primordial spirits, not one. Ahura Mazda, the Lord Wisdom, is all good, and loving, and creative, intrinsically radiant, surrounded by spiritual beings of his creation– Mithra, Verethraghna, Anahita and the rest. Zarathushtra addresses him as a friend. Then there is the independent, unrelated Frightful Spirit, Angra Mainyu, or, as the name later contracts, Ahreman. Evil exists because the two exist, not because God permits it. How could he? He is good, and his goodness is knowable– he is the Lord Wisdom, after all. In fact he fights evil– the world as we know it is a place that has been invaded and is at war– and has created man to fight alongside him. The plants and animals, the waters and fire and even the rocks, instinctively support Ahura Mazda, and Ahreman assaults and sometimes infects them; but men and women (who are equal– Iran has no myth of Eve, serpent, and apple) are powerful by virtue of possessing mind, and mind is by nature free, and freedom includes the ability to make a choice. And since Ahura Mazda is all good, he is not all powerful; so when you choose to fight evil God cannot fully protect you and you will certainly suffer. The battle is long, so probably you will not live to enjoy victory in this world, though there is a heaven and hell and a messianic end to history (all of the latter ideas are original to Zarathushtra and the subsequent religions of the West have borrowed them, along with the figure of the devil and his demonic court, more or less). Talk about walking a tightrope.

Zarathushtra wandered for twelve more years with his family, and only his cousin Maidhyoimaongha, "Half Moon," accepted his teachings at first. His clan drove him away. Ahreman tempted the lone, derided Prophet with world dominion. Zarathushtra took two stones, one in each hand, each stone the size of a house nowadays, says the Avesta, and threw them at the evil spirit in contempt. Ahreman exploded in rage, sending storm winds and darkness. Zarathushtra shouted back over the thunder: I will never abandon the Good Vision of Ahura Mazda, he declared, no, not even if my head is severed from my body! He did not surrender. Some years later, at the lake called Frazdanu, the king Kavi Vishtaspa was persuaded by his wife, Hutaosha, to accept the Prophet's teachings. Their neighbors declared war on them for this, fearing the wrath of the demons; and Vishtaspa confronted them, even though he learnt through prophecy that his own brother, Zarer, would perish. (Armenian Zareh perpetuates this hero's name.) The same seer, Jamaspa, who foretold this, told Vishtaspa also that he could avoid the battle by taking refuge in an impregnable fortress, that has come to be known in Eastern folklore as the City of Bronze, Armenian Pghndze k'aghak'. But the price would be the triumph of evil in the rest of the earth. Vishtaspa refused flight and safety, preferring to stand and fight. Zoroastrianism survived; his kingdom did not.

The Avesta is steeped in these strains of bravery, fortified by vision and wisdom, bowed by pain and sacrifice but restored by hope and courage. Zoroastrian Iran created the material culture– some religious ideas and more legal concepts, poetry and music, art and architecture, cuisine and athletics, carpets, domes, even the symbol of the crescent, everything– that has been the France and the Italy of later Middle Eastern civilization. But there is one important feature that was almost lost. For you see, Zoroastrianism is monotheistic, in the sense that Ahura Mazda is the only God– the Destructive Spirit Ahreman is not a divine being, but a total negation, impossible to worship save by some perversion of the good and deception and defeat of the mind. But it is dualistic: there are two independent principles in existence, not one. Ancient Iran was the world's sole great civilization constructed on this principle of dualism. Every other society on earth has been either polytheistic or monist. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam– the Jerusalem Big Three– are all monist. What this means, among other things, is that since God is all powerful, nothing man does can be of any real cosmic importance. There is no possible understandable answer to the paradox of the existence of evil beneath the dominion of a God who is all powerful and all good: one is reduced to various crippling excuses. Evil serves a mysterious cosmic purpose. Evil is a test. Evil is a sort of boot camp, strengthening our weak selves– no pain, no gain. Evil doesn't really exist at all, it's just privatio boni, the absence of good, a sort of hole in the cloth of the cosmos that God just lets be there. Yeah, right. Unde malum– Where does evil come from? Maybe evil's just within us to start with, or it's subjective, which is fine as an answer but it then makes the rest of religion irrelevant: stop going to church, then, and sit around in a Paris café drinking black coffee with the other existentialists and decide whether today's the day you go back to your garret and blow your brains out. Wonderful. William S. Burroughs called our setup the OGU, the One God Universe. It's entropic, it's intellectually demeaning, it's boring. The Iranian faith is the creed of courage, of humans who believe that what they do really matters. In the Big Three, it's all mystery and submission. No more heroes.

When Armenia went Christian and Iran went Moslem, the Good Religion went underground. The Scriptures were closed; so the ancient ethos survived elsewhere, in heroic epic. The Persian Shah-nameh of Ferdosi with its heroes Faredun and Zarir and Rostam (and his talking horse Rakhsh), and the Epic of Sasun with the twins Sanasar and Baghdasar, the two Mithras, and David (and his talking horse Kurrkik Jelali), became the secular scripture, the other voice of the two cultures beneath the official creeds. Pre-Christian Armenians had known Faredun as Hruden; his evil opponent, the dragon-man Azhi Dahaka, was their Azhdahak, who becomes the enemy Tigran the Great. Movses Khorenats'i implores his patron, prince Sahak Bagratuni, to stop asking him for stories of Rostam the Saka. And down to the last century, Armenian bards, speaking in the dialects of Mush and Narek, interwove Rostam and Burze into the Sasun cycle, and in the oral epic of their neighbors, the Kurds, Sasun enters the Iranian orbit of Rostam. This pattern, of epic coming to enshrine cultural and spiritual values when access to other means of transmission, principally those of religious literature, is denied, is not unique: we can observe it in various cultures, perhaps most strikingly in Ossetia (that is, the land of the modern descendants of the north Iranian Alans), where Christianity was succeeded by Islam. Neither took root amongst these proud, magnificent people. (You may recall that in Armenian heroic poetry Artashes kidnapped and married their princess Satenik, who is the mythical mother of the Nart heroes.) Both extirpated the institutions of the old religion, though, leaving nothing behind. So the epic of the Narts has become the repository of the culture in its entirety. In Armenia, as we have learnt by now to suspect, the culture arrived at more subtle compromises and calculations than the schizophrenic solution of heroic epic versus Qur'an in Moslem Iran or the heroic epic or bust of Alania. It is the heroization of the Armenian Christian cycle itself. The Apostolic mission of St. Thaddeus is interwoven into the myth of Satenik and Artashes, in the legend of the Sukiasean martyrs. Subsequently, like Cyrus or Ardashir i Papakan, St. Gregory the Illuminator is mythologized into a prince who is spirited away to survival as a child, to return as an adult and exact vengeance. When in the fourth century Armenia is faced with the prospect of apostasy or the ultimate extinction of Arsacid sovereignty, king Arshak, guided by the seer Nerses, chooses the latter, on the model of the foundational epic of Zoroastrianism itself: in the narrative of P'awstos the topos from the Memorial of Zarer of the boy riding secretly out of camp to avenge his fallen father, the commander, is repeated– only the commander is not Vishtaspa's brother this time, but a Mamikonean. The armature and sense of Iranian heroic tradition are inseparable from the singular edifice that is Armenian Christianity.

There is a professor at Harvard who says civilizations today are fated to clash. But civilizations by their very nature converse; it is only when the light of civilization fails that men fight. Armenia has experienced as few others have the tragedy of the dying of the light and the callous indifference of a world in which it stood alone; but equally, as we have seen in the course of these three lectures, the essence of Armenian culture is compounded of many elements contributed by others, the fruit of a continuous dialogue of culture across millennia made into a living whole– Anatolia in the magic of the land, its caves and springs and myths; the mystics and merchants and scholars of Aram; the philosophical, skeptical mind of Hellas; and the joyful and triumphant sun of Iran, its heroic heart, Zarathushtra's sacred fire. The everlasting dialogue of civilizations assures every man of a share in the wealth of the world's culture; equally, it insists upon the unwavering perception of a common human lot and fate, and therefore demands that a man assume personal responsibility to stand up in the defense of other men against injustice. Sa'di writes in the Golestan, Banī Ādam a΄zāye yekdīgarand, ke dar āfrinesh ze yek gōharand. Chū ΄uzvī bedard āvarad rūzgar, dīgar ΄uzūhārā namānad qarār. Tō kaz mehnate dīgarān bīghamī, nashāyad ke nāmat nehanad ādamī. "The children of Adam are limbs of the same body, created of the same essence; and when time brings pain to one, the others must suffer. If you feel no sorrow for others' afflictions, then you are undeserving of the name of man." That consciousness requires a strong spiritual foundation, philosophical acumen, and readiness for heroic action. These are some of the cultural values that in fact shaped Armenian culture and have contributed to its remarkable survival. In the Spring of 2002 I read at NAASR four lectures, "The Near East in the Mind of America." Those included Armenia amongst the nations whose heritage contributed to the growth of this nation; these three lectures, "The Near East in the Mind of Armenia," conclude the series. But these are still only a tiny part of the great mosaic of interaction of human cultures and the growth of knowledge. "That powerful play goes on," to recall Whitman's words, to which you may contribute a verse. It is a play that in truth has only just begun.