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Updated: May 13, 2025
They adored fire, light, and the sun, as emblems of Ormuzd, the source of all light and purity, but did not regard them as independent deities. The religious rites and ceremonies were regulated by the priests, who were called Magi.
The moral code of Zoroaster is pure and elevated. It aims to assimilate the character of man to light, to dissipate the darkness of ignorance; it acknowledges Ormuzd as the ruler of the universe; it seeks to extend the triumph of virtue over the material and spiritual world. The religion of Zoroaster prevailed for many centuries in Persia.
But, however the pronouncements may conform, however also they may confuse, the one reported in Exodus is alone exact. In subsequent metamorphoses the name might fade, the deity remained. Whereas, save to diminishing Parsis, Ormuzd, once omnipotent throughout the Persian sky, has gone.
It was a modification and purification of the old fire-worship, in which the fire became a symbol of the sun, so that it was really a species of sun-worship. Mithras, representing the sun, becomes the mediator between Ormuzd, or the principle of Darkness, and the world. "The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, if it is a real advantage, follows unavoidably from the idea of God.
The Poetic Persian sacrificed to the sun, as the completest image of Ormuzd, his God; the devout children of the far East carved their deities out of wood and ivory; but the Ethiopian, without writing, without books, without mechanical faculty of any kind, quieted his soul by the worship of animals, birds, and insects, holding the cat sacred to Re, the bull to Isis, the beetle to Pthah.
But this state of things will not last forever. The time will come when the adherents of Ormuzd shall everywhere be victorious, and Ahriman and his followers be consigned to darkness forever. The religious rites of the ancient Persians were exceedingly simple. They used neither temples, altars, nor statues, and performed their sacrifices on the tops of mountains.
AHRIMAN, or ARIMANES. In the religious system of Zoroaster, the principle of evil, or darkness, which was perpetually opposing Ormuzd, the principle of good, or light. See Zoroaster. ALFADER. The father of all, or the universal Father. The principal deity of the Scandinavian mythology.
In bare justice to brave, misguided Humanity; in daily touch with beings in so many respects little lower than the imagined angels; in dispassionate survey of history's lurid record of distorted loyalty staining our old, sad earth with life-blood of opposing loyalty, while each side fights for an idea; in view of the zeal which fires the martyr-spirit to endure all that equal zeal can inflict; in contemplation of the ever-raging enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, the Ormuzd and the Ahriman in man; in view even of that dismal experiment indifferently termed "making the best of both worlds," and "serving God and Mammon " in view of all these things, I cannot think it is anything worse than a locally-seated and curable ignorance which makes men eager to subvert a human equality, self-evident as human variety, and impregnable as any mathematical axiom.
But after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans under Adrian, A.D. 135, and the final dispersion of the Jews, fears being entertained that the oral law would be lost, it was then committed to writing, and now constitutes the text of the Talmud. ORMUZD. Worshipped by the disciples of Zoroaster as the principle of good, and symbolized by light. See Ahriman.
In the oak-woods of Britain the Druids held their followers; Odin and Freya maintained their godships in Gaul and Germany and among the Hyperboreans; Egypt was satisfied with her crocodiles and Anubis; the Persians were yet devoted to Ormuzd and Ahriman, holding them in equal honor; in hope of the Nirvana, the Hindoos moved on patient as ever in the rayless paths of Brahm; the beautiful Greek mind, in pauses of philosophy, still sang the heroic gods of Homer; while in Rome nothing was so common and cheap as gods.
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