A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

the urgency and existential tension with which Zarathustra questions his Lord: he asks him to teach him the secrets of the cosmogony, to reveal his future to him, but also the fate of certain persecutors and of all the wicked. Each strophe of the celebrated Yasna 44 is introduced by the same formula: “This is what I ask you, Lord—answer me well!” Zarathustra wants to know “who assigned their road to the sun and the stars” (3), “who fixed the earth below, and the sky of clouds, so that it does not fall” (4); and his questions concerning the Creation follow one another in an ever faster rhythm. But he wants to know, too, how his soul, “arrived at the Good, will be ravished?” (8), and “how shall we get rid of evil” (13), “how shall I deliver evil into the hands of justice?” (14). He demands that “visible marks” shall be given him (16) and, above all, that he shall be united with Ahura Mazdā and that his “word shall be efficacious” (17). But he adds: “Shall I obtain in payment, through Justice (Arta), ten mares, with a stallion, and a camel that have been promised me, O Wise One?”