Our Story begins neither in the East, West, or South Asia, nor in the Axial Age. To understand the great changes in these Axial centers we must begin in Central Asia at least a millennium before the Axial Age is underway. We will be looking at the culture and religious practices of people living in the area of the south Russian steppes east of the Volga River and north of the Caspian Sea. Today this region roughly corresponds to the land from Ukraine to West Kazakhstan. Five thousand years ago, this area was mostly a barren desert that saw little rainfall and suffered bitter cold winters and harsh summers. It was not an easy place in which to live.
We don’t know a great deal about the inhabitants of the Central Asian steppes in the pre-Axial period. But one thing most scholars believe is that many of the original occupants of this area and their descendants gradually migrated to other parts of the world, including northern Europe, the northern Mediterranean region, as far west as Ireland, and southward into Iran and India. Through careful analysis of languages as diverse as Icelandic, German, Gaelic, Latin and Greek, Russian, Persian, Sanskrit, Sinhalese, and of course English the modern discipline of linguistics has determined that these languages derive from what was once a single language. Linguists have tried to reconstruct the original language, but it has proven to be an elusive task. Over time, as the descendants of these Central Asians scattered throughout Eurasia, this single language evolved into dozens of languages and dialects that we refer to as the Indo-European family of languages.
Of the many groups that migrated from this region to other locations, the one we’re most interested in are those who migrated southward into the regions now occupied by the countries of Iran and India. To differentiate this group from other members of the Indo-European peoples, we’ll refer to them as the Indo-Iranians. This group remained together until about 4000 years ago when it slowly split and moved in two separate directions. You don’t need a P.h.D. to figure out that the Iranian branch went into the land of Iran. Some of them ventured into Mesopotamia, the area of present day Iraq; the Indo branch went into Afghanistan and then into the Indus-Valley, gradually spreading across northern India. As Indo-Iranians divided, their languages evolved from one another, but they were similar enough that communication was still possible. The Iranian tribes spoke a dialect we call Avestan, because now it only exists in a collection of scared writings known as the Avesta. The group that migrated to India and spoke a form of the language we know as Sanskrit.
Of course, these people did not refer to themselves as Indo-Iranians. The called themselves aria, a term that translates into English as noble. So, their self-designation was the noble ones. When each group arrived at its final destination, they called their new territory the land of the noble. The Indian group knew their new home not as India but as Aryavarta and the Iranians called theirs Airyana vaejah, and this term eventually evolved into the word Iran. The name Ireland, by the way has a similar derivation and also means the land of the Noble. To keeps things straight, we will use the term Indo-Aryans to refer to the group that settled in India and the word Iranians to designate that group that ended up in Iran, that is, after they split.
The principal focus of our discussion is not on these groups after their separation but on the time when they were united in Central Asia and beginning their southward movement. For this period, we will simply call them Indo-Iranians. Later we will dwell on these groups separately and compare and contrast them.
Basically, what we know of the Indo-Iranians comes from two sources: the Rig Veda, the oldest extant Indo-European text, and the Avesta, a slightly later text from Iran that was preserved in oral tradition just as the Rig Veda. Since they were composed before the split, the Rig Veda and the Avesta tell us a good bit about Indo-Iranian life.
The Rig Veda and Avesta make clear that these peoples were nomadic and semi-nomadic shepherds and cattle herders, who wandered around in relatively small areas seeking pasture-land for their animals. Since the steppes were rather arid and barren, the Indo-Iranians were not great agriculturalist. Their principle source of their food therefore, was the domesticated animals they kept and the wild animals they hunted.
Their society was essentially divided priests and everyone else, who were called the producers because of their work. They arranged themselves into tribes with little to no formal governing structures.
Early Indo-Iranian society appears to have been relatively peaceful and probably rather static. It seems to have existed for centuries with little significant cultural changes. Since they had not yet tamed the horse, the earliest Indo-Iranians did not travel very far and they knew noting of the kind of warfare that the horse made possible for other societies. The early religious life of the Indo-Iranians, as much as it can be reconstructed from our limited sources, suggests a rather commonsensical view for people living in the harsh environment of Central Asia. Like almost all ancient groups, the Indo-Iranians had their gods, their beliefs about the nature of the world and rituals that helped them understand and influence those gods and the world.
The gods were of various sorts, related to different aspects of everyday life. Especially important to the ordinary people were the gods who controlled the parts of the natural world. These gods included the Sky and the Earth known as Adman and Zam—the Sun and the Moon—Hvar and Mah, as they were called—and the winds—Vata and Vayu. Although not consider gods in the same sense, Trees were venerated, especially those growing beside a river or stream because the bark was thought to have healing properties. Still today, in India certain trees growing by a temple or sacred shrine are found near by or on a river or stream. At one time the Indo-Iranians worshiped an overarching god—a kind of king of the gods—but over time he became so remote and distant from everyday life that he simply became irrelevant and the Aryans effectively forgot about him. In Iranian dialect he was called Dyaos and in the Indian dialect he was known as Ddyaus-Pitr. Both names are cognates of the Greek and Roman terms for their chief sky gods, Zeus and Jupiter.
I n addition to the gods of nature the gods associated with ritual practices were particularly important, namely, the Fire, the Water and a deity called the Soul of the Bull, and a vision inducing substance called haoma in the Avestan dialect and soma in the Sanskrit. These divinities were especially significant to the priests.
A third category of divine beings was the ahuras in Avestan, or asuaras in Sanskrit, words that simply mean lord. In this class of gods, three were of greatest significance. The first two were associated with oaths and promise keeping. Making oaths and pledges, of course are important to any society, but not all cultures in the ancient world had the human means to enforce such covenants and agreements. It was not uncommon therefore, for the gods to be invoked to punish individuals who failed to live up to their oaths. We still have a vestige of this practice in certain legal proceedings where an individual swears to do something as telling the truth, and then concludes with “so help me God.” The ancients might have added an additional clause like “and may I be smitten by god so and so if I fail to honor my word.
Among the Indo-Iranians, pledges and oaths were originally believed to carry a divine power in themselves, sufficient to enforce the promise. Over time this power resident in the words became personified and associated with two anthropomorphic deities who took their names from two kinds of promises that one could make. Their names were Varuna and Mithra.
T he third and greatest of the ahuras, however, was Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom. That is Mazda, spelled just like the name of the car. The car, by the way, was so named for three reasons: first, to honor the god Mazda: and second because Mazda still means in Persian, wisdom: and third, because the family name of the Japanese manufacturer is Matsuda, which when Anglicized sounds a lot like Mazda. But in the ancient world, Mazda was not originally associated with vehicles or any physical phenomenon. However, later in the Iranian tradition, he is represented by the sun. When we take up Zoroastrian reform, we will see how Lord Mazda assumes a very prominent role, becoming the most important god of all for the Iranians.
And finally, there were numerous lessor divinities called the shiny ones. In Sanskrit, shiny one translates the word deva and in Avestan the word daeva. Both words have obvious cognates in other Indo-European languages. You can think of deus in Latin or divine in English. The shiny ones represented such qualities as courage friendship, justice, obedience, and glory—a quality that dwells in gods and heroes and prophets, like charisma we might say today. In the later Indo-Aryan tradition, deva ( and its female form, devi), are terms for the most important class of divinities, although that was not the case in Iran.
In addition to this rather complex world of spirits and gods, the Indo-Iranians believed in a more abstract, impersonal principle of order. The Sanskrit speakers called it rta, and the Avestan speakers refer to it as asha. Both words designate a kind of natural law that maintains the cosmic order, keeping the sun on its path and the seasons following in proper sequence. Rta and asha had moral as well as cosmological dimensions and in this sense represented an absolute principle for human behavior— and I might add divine behavior since the deities themselves were also subject to Rta/asha.
Obedience of the moral law promoted harmony and well being for the individual and for society, but the principle or order was also opposed by another power that accounted for disharmony and chaos. The Iranians, for whom this element of disorder became very prominent in later theology, called it druj. Because these two principles were diametrically opposed to one another, kind of in a constant struggle for dominance, the Indo-Iranians considered it necessary to help maintain and strengthen asha, the orderly element. They believed they could do so by ritual means. Proper observance of the religious rites thus enhanced the power of asha and promoted harmony in the world. Now, this is one instance of the pre-Axial practice of cosmic maintenance, based on the responsibility the people felt for collaborating with the processes on which their lives depended.
To understand pre-Axial rituals in any culture we must have a good grasp of its beliefs about the origins of the world, those things that are found in cosmogonies and creations stories .Cosmogonies generally proved prototypes or templates for ritual practices. The performers of religious rites often understood themselves as reenacting the divine work of creation, and thereby renewing creation and giving it a fresh beginning.
To illustrate this point we have a brief retelling of the creation of the world from the Avestan texts and then speak of how that translated into ritual practices.
The Avestan version says that the Earth was created in seven stages, not unlike the seven-day scheme that we find in the book of Genesis, which was actually written much later at least that is the latest scholarly speculation. The driving force behind the Avestan creation story—whether a god or gods—isn’t really clear, although sometimes it appears to be the work of Ahura Mazda.
In the first stage, the sky came into being. Now, the sky was conceived to be something like a gigantic inverted bowl made of beautiful stone. Now to me, thinking of the sky as a solid hemisphere is just profoundly sensible. Rather then believing that the sky was our perception of infinite space, as we moderns might think, it seemed obvious to the ancients that it was finite and a sold structure.
In the second stage of creation water was created covering the bottom of the sky shell. Imagine an upside down bowl floating on the surface of the water in you kitchen sink. Now let a salad plate also float on the water’s surface underneath the sky-bowl and you have added the third stage: the creation of the solid earth, like a flat dish afloat on water.
In the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages, life was added to the physical world. Originally, there was one plant, then one animal— a bull–and finally ---- a man, named Yima in the Avestan and Yama in the Sanskrit. And in the seventh stage, fire was added, an element pervading the entire created world, residing in seen and unseen places.
In the final act of creation, the gods assembled to perform the first ritual act, a sacrifice. By crushing and dismembering the primordial plant, the bull, and the man the gods created new lives, and the vegetable, animal, and human realms were populated and the world set in motion following the course os asha. Death soon appeared, as did reproduction and new life, and the world was on its way. In a ritual setting , the Indo-Iranians reenacted this primordial sacrifice to maintain the cosmic and moral order and to ensure that new life properly replaced the old. The rituals they performed were of many sorts, for the simple to the complex.
Among the simplest were offerings of libations to the gods of Water and of Fire. In the arid and cold steppes region the very importance of—indeed, the very sacredness of—these two elements are evident. To Water was given a libation of milk and two plant leaves to represent the animal and vegetable realms. These libations returned to the divine powers the vital elements that they required to continue productivity The water goddess was strengthened by these gifts.
Fire was of great importance not only for winter warmth but also for cooking meant, the staple of the Indo-Iranian diet. Because starting fire was difficult, fires were kept continually burning in the fireplaces and terra cotta pots. Like libations to Water, offerings to Fire were frm the two kingdoms: incense and wood from plants and animal fat from cooked meant. The melting fat made the flames blaze up, visibly fortifying the fire.
For more complex rituals, a sacred space had to be created and professional priests were required to conduct them. Because of the nomadic life, the ritual precinct was temporary and portable. Sacred space was marked by lines drawn on the ground as prayers were uttered to keep out the evil spirits. Fires burned in sacred vessels and pits dug in the ground.
The most sacred fire rituals often involved blood sacrifice, usually goats, sheep, or cattle. The Avestan word for sacrifice was yasna, almost identical to the Sanskrit term yajna. The Indo-Iranians were awed by the acts of taking life and they did so reverentially. Animal sacrifices had to be performed with special prayers to enable the animal’s spirit or life force to continue on. Obviously, this suggest a strong affinity between humans and animals. One of the Avestan texts even says “We reverence our own souls, and those of domestic animals which nourish us...and the souls of useful wild animals.” The spirits of sacrificed animals were believed to become part of the divine being called the Soul of the Bull, the life energy of the animal world. Animal blood actually nourished this deity and so doing the Indo-Iranians were helping the god to care for the animals on earth and to guarantee their abundance. Consecrated and cooked meat was also offered to the other gods and then eaten by the participants in the sacrifice. Because of their respect for animal life, the Indo-Iranians only ate consecrated meant from their domestic animals. Even before killing a wild animal for food, hunters said prayers to ensure the animal’s spirit’s safe return to the Soul of the Bull.
The priest led rituals that also involved another element, a beverage known by soma in Sanskrit or haoma in Avestan. This substance like Fire, and Water, was regarded as a god and resided in a special species of plant whose identity is unknown to us today and maybe was even unknown to the Indo-Iranians after their departure from Central Asia. The liquid essence of these plants was pressed out and then mixed as a golden drink resembling honey.
Soma had properties that allowed those who imbibed it to feel ecstatic, literally out of their ordinary world and transported to the realm of the gods. This passage from the Rig Veda captures a sense of the experience of consuming soma:
We have drunk Soma
I have tasted the sweet drink of life, knowing that it inspires thoughts and joyous expansiveness to the extreme, that all the gods and mortals seek it together, calling it ...[ambvrosia]
When you penetrate inside, you will know no limits, and you will avert the wrath of the gods....
We have drunk the soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and the malice of a mortal do to us now. O Immortal one?....
The glorious drops that I have drunk set me free in wide space...Let the drops protect me from the foot that stumbles and keep lameness away from me.
Inflame me like a fire kindled by friction; make us see far; make us richer, better . I am intoxicated with you, soma. I think
myself rich. Draw and make us thrive...
Weakness and diseases have gone; the forces of darkness have fled in terror. Soma has climbed in us, expanding. We have come to the place where they stretch out life spans.
By ingesting soma, the Indo-Iranians achieved what they considered the apex of existence: the sense of immortality; freedom from suffering and fear; communion with the gods and the spirit world and intense pleasure. Little wonder that soma was so highly prized and zealously protected. Its chief downside however was that it provided only temporary ecstasy. Eventually the effects would wear off, and ordinary life would reassert itself. But the experience of divine communion was important in confirming the existence of the gods and expanding the mind to consider the deepest possibilities of human life. Soma allowed the Indo-Iranians to imagine a life free of suffering and fear. In the centuries to come the heirs of these traditions wold seek similar experiences through the techniques of introspection and ascetic practice rather than physical substances.
1. We now have observed that the central purpose of this religion was to allow the people to collaborate in the processes and functions of life.
2. These forces were often personified as gods and goddesses or as an abstract impersonal principle.
3. Human beings had to do their part to keep both the natural world and the social world in good working order and it is clear there was a close kinship between the humans and the divines.
4. Next we explore the world of Zoroaster.