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

by Mircea Eliade

For years an intense controversy has divided scholars on the subject of the Zoroastrianism of Darius and his successors. Against the Zoroastrianism of the Great Kings, the following arguments, among others, are brought forward: Zarathustra is not named in any inscription; terms and names as important as spenta, Angra Mainyu, and the Amesha Spentas (except Arta) are absent; then too, the religion of the Persians at the time of the Achaemenids, as described by Herodotus, has nothing Zoroastrian about it. In favor of the Zoroastrianism of the Achaemenids, the name of the great god Ahuramazdā, glorified in the inscriptions, is cited, together with the fact that when, under Artaxerxes I (465–425), the new calendar was introduced, featuring the names of the Zoroastrian Entities, the reform aroused no opposition.27 However this may be, if the Achaemenids were not Zoroastrians, their theology was on the same plane as that of the gāthās: it abounds in abstract expressions, comparable to those of the gāthās, and it is “laden with moral considerations.”