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This could not have happened if the religion of the Persian kings had not been a pure service of one god, and the other information we have on the subject shows that the Mazdeism of Persia at this period was a very elevated form of the religion.
How this Doctrine Entered Mazdeism. But in later Mazdeism there are many such importations. This religion, in its course from east to west, came in contact with beliefs and usages with which, though foreign to its own nature, it yet came to terms. Mazdeism is not originally a markedly priestly religion; it is thought that it became so when planted in Media.
In the later works the revelation takes place in a series of private interviews between Ahura and Zarathustra; the prophet puts questions to the god, and the god dictates in reply sentences which are at once promulgated as sacred laws. Mazdeism, like other religions, has its wooden age, its verbal inspiration, and its priestly code.
Iran in fact had not one religion but several, and thus the problem is to trace how these successively entered into contact with Mazdeism or Zoroastrianism, which is the religion most native to Iran, and were embodied in it. The different religions belonged to a certain extent to different provinces.
The firm organisation of these hosts of spiritual beings, and the sense of a great conflict in which they are all engaged from the greatest to the least of them, preserve Mazdeism from the weakness and absurdity which are apt to creep over religion when the population of the upper and the nether regions is unduly multiplied.
Mazdeism itself had a tinge of universalism; Zarathustra expected his religion to spread beyond his own land, and it did spread over all the provinces of Iran. It never became a world-religion, but it might have done so had it not become swathed and choked in Magism or had any new movement arisen in it to assert the supremacy of its purely human over its artificial elements.
The name of Magi, originally perhaps that of a tribe, became in Media the name of the priesthood, and so furnished an additional title for Mazdeism. It is to this stage of the religion that the priestly legislation of the Vendidad, with all its puritanical regulation of life, is to be ascribed.
In the eyes of Erskine, Zend was a Sanscrit dialect, imported from India by the founders of Mazdeism, but never spoken in Persia. His main argument was that Zend is not mentioned among the seven dialects which were current in ancient Persia according to the Farhang-i Jehangiri, and that Pahlavi and Persian exhibit no close relationship with Zend. In Germany, Meiners had found no followers.
Mazdeism, the religion of Zoroaster, based upon the worship of fire, and in that sense not altogether unfamiliar to the Chinese, reached China some time in the seventh century A.D. The first temple was built at Ch'ang-an, the capital, in 621, ten years after which came the famous missionary, Ho Lu the Magus. But the lease of life enjoyed by this religion was of short duration. Islamism.
The official religion of the state was that practiced by Cyrus and his predecessors in their native land. The essential doctrines of the religion, commonly known as Mazdeism or Zoroastrianism, presented a sharp contrast to the beliefs that still were current in Babylonia, and it was inevitable that with the influx of new ideas, the further development of Babylonian worship was cut short.
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