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

by Mircea Eliade

The spiritual, and in a sense “philosophical,” nature of the religion of Zarathustra is striking.18 The transmutation of the most important Āryan divinities into Amesha Spentas (the Blessed Holy Ones), who make up Ahura Mazdā’s escort, and the fact that each of these Entities comprises an abstract value (Order, Power, Devotion, etc.) at the same time that it governs a cosmic element (fire, metal, earth, etc.), denote at once creative imagination and a capacity for rigorous reflection. By associating the Amesha Spentas with him, Zarathustra succeeds in defining the way in which Ahura Mazdā intervenes in the world and also makes it clear how the Lord, through his “archangels,” can help and support his worshipers. The fact that the Prophet calls his God “wise,” that he magnifies the importance of “truth,” that he continually extols “good thought,” only accentuates the newness of his message: he emphasizes the function and religious value of wisdom, that is, of science, of accurate and useful knowledge. To be sure, it is not a matter of abstract science in the modern sense of the term but of a creative thought that discovers and at the same time creates the structures of the world and the universe of values that is their correlative.