ENDING THE COSMIC WAR: THE DEEP HISTORY OF THE COSMIC WAR

THOUSANDS OF YEARS PASS....

Last time I talked about the Cosmic War, described it has taking place in three places: the metaphysical realm the physical world, and the human heart. I talked about how it is a good idea gone bad, how it has been part of our culture for so long we don’t even notice it, and how it needs to end. I am making a big claim here: that the Cosmic War is not real, that it is harmful to us, that it needs to end, and that I know how to end it.

This time I will talk about the deep history of the Cosmic War, and how it came to be in the from in is now.

Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War by me, Karen Effie.

Firstly, when I say ‘we’ and ‘history’, I am talking mostly about speakers of the Indo-European language family. I think this is fair enough here because that seems to be where the Cosmic War comes from. Indo-European language family speakers have had a disproportionate influence over history, due to a long imperialistic stage, and now that stage is mostly over, it is a great time to assess that influence. Other cultural groups don’t seem to have this Cosmic War, although their cosmogenic stories are just as full of conflict and drama as ours is. I know ‘the west’ and ‘the north world’ are fraught concepts, but I need to use some terms we (there’s that word again!) are familiar with.

We often look at early religion from two perspectives that are different, but end up treating them similarly. The first is a Christian perspective. Pagan and other religions as sometimes a precursor to Christianity, and sometimes incompatible with it. Thus, to medieval Christian writers such as the Bede, and Snorri Sturluson, the Norse gods were their great ancestors. When Christian thinkers took the various faiths we know as Hinduism seriously, they were impressed by the sophistication and wisdom of the writings of the ancient sages. They saw these writings as romantic, exotic, and deeply spiritual, but nevertheless not salvific. Because only Christ was their Saviour. These are best cases. There are many more cases of Pagan and other Axial Age religions being discounted or opposed or persecuted.

The second perspective arose from early anthropology. EB Tylor, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, is usually considered to the be founder of social anthropology. He took an interest in forms of belief which he thought of as primitive, including folk magic from his own part of England. He was a cultural evolutionist. Just as the monkey was superseded by the ape, and the ape by the human (with white men at the top), Paganism was superseded by polytheism, polytheism was superseded by monotheism, and monotheism was superseded by atheism. You can see the influence of nineteenth century thinking in just that formula: imperialism, Darwinism, rationalism, the use of formulae and the apparent laws of nature.

Both these perspectives are now seen as outdated. Yet the influence us still, because often the source material – the potsherds and bones and texts – were collected at that time and interpreted according to the ideas of that time. Here, I will acknowledge that this is our cultural history, and try to do better.

Another big trap I risk falling into tis the debate around change. Both the perspectives above emphasized progress. Cultural change was large and often sudden and complete. Past thinkers particularly looked for comparatively large causes for these large changes, such as divine decree, or sudden developments in the human brain, or geographical catastrophe. Other things have seen change as much more tentative and complex, and not nearly so thorough. David Graeber and David Wengrow, in their book “The Dawn of Everything” describe long experiments with agriculture, for example, where cultures practiced agriculture for a while and then went to pastoralism, and back and forth. Or where North American cultures practiced one form of social structure in Summer and another in Winter. For the Davids, change is constant, and changers are numerous and for many different reasons. There is no grand arc of progression.

Having outlined some of the pitfalls of taking on such a huge task, and hoping that the perfect is in fact the enemy of the good, and having not a lot of common sense, I will begin the narrative. I will tell the story of Stories. Here we go.

Some of my ancestors spoke a language we can reconstruct as Proto Indo-European. We know a bit about them. They consisted of many different semi-nomadic peoples who themselves had differing ancestries. They trundled around the Easter European steppes with wagons, which was no mean feat at the time, because the steppe lands were like the sea, inhospitable and huge. By domesticating horses, and using wagons, my ancestors were able to travel long distances, and fight and sustain themselves on the move. I am talking about the 6^th to the 4^th century BCE here, thus over a long period of time.

Their religious beliefs were those of people on the move. They valued fire and the hearth, and their gods were of sky and earth and the wide dawn, and they created rituals for the open air rather than the temple.

It is not possible to determine how these people thought. We can’t get into their heads. However, we know that later religions carried through time the themes and Stories of these earlier peoples. Roman religion is a bit more useful than Greek, say, because it is less influenced by religious ideas from Egypt and the Levant. But nothing is pure, nothing stands by itself.

Most of the deities were associated with natural forces or particular virtues or characteristics. The most often given example is Dyeus Pitr, who is a paternal sky god figure, whose name becomes Zeus in Greece and Jupiter in Rome. It doesn’t really work to say he was the god of the sky; that is a much later interpretation. Sacrifices were made to gods, sometimes in ritual s involving whole communities. The relationship with deitites was in some respects transactional. You asked the gods a question and the gods answered, but the answer was not infallible and was open to interpretation. You asked the gods for help, and you gave to them so that you could get from them. Deities were big people. Like us, but writ large. They were not perfect. They messed with each other and with humans. This is important, this idea of deities we now think of as Pagan, these big people, whose motives were mysterious and transcendent, but not always moral, and not always in our interests.

We can reconstruct early Indo-European beliefs to the extent that we can tell a Story. It’s a great Story that echoes down through later Stories from the Vedas to the Eddas. Here it is.

Two men are wandering around in the Void (with their cow). Sometimes the two men are brothers or even twins. One of them kills the other. From his body the universe is created. Different features of the natural world relate to the body parts of the corpse. People relate to different body parts as well, with higher castes coming from more important body parts, and lower castes coming from less important body parts. Thus the cosmic order is formed, and thus human society is also formed. The social order is literally organic. Rituals conducted by the priestly caste remind all the people of how this happened, and helped maintain the cosmic order. It is a cosmogeny of violence, and sacrifice by the one who died.

By the fourth or third millennium BCE a group of peoples we call the Indo-Iranians moved into the area now known as Iran. They were steppe dwellers and chariot fighters, who were in contact with settled peoples further to the South. They revered fire, water and the grasses, and all that gave and took life and they took their sacrifices very seriously. Their gods were associated with natural forces, and with virtues. They had deep concepts of cosmic rightness and wrongness, a sort of universal grain which human actions go could with or against. Some of the deities they worshipped were similar to those of the Vedas: Vedic religion, that which later became the group of ideas we call Hinduism, was developing at the same time, and can compare the two. There were deities who were friendly to humans, and deities who weren’t. Warlike gods were worshipped; war was part of the cosmic order. The priests re-enacted the actions of the deities in order to retain right relationship with an unending universe. There was an afterlife of sorts, those who had made many sacrifices, or were of the priestly caste, passed over a narrow bridge and entered paradise (an Iranian word, by the way). The rest of us just perished.

Now we come to the big event. I am always suspicious of Big Event history, where one person, usually a man, does something that changes the world etc etc. But this really was the real deal. Here we go. Maybe four thousand years ago, in what is now northern Iran, there lived a man of the priestly caste, who we call Zarathustra or Zoroaster in the Greek. At dawn, on the say of the Spring festival, he went to draw water from a river. When he returned to the bank, he had a vision. A great being appeared to him, a being who declared themselves to be Good Purpose. This great being led him to Ahura Mazda, great god of wisdom, and five other heavenly beings, and the light was so great Zarathustra could not see his own shadow, and he received a revelation.

Ahura Mazda was not new. He had always been associated with rightness and order in the universe. But for the first time, this was a revelation for all of humankind, delivered to Zarathustra. Ahura Mazda appeared to Zarathustra directly many times over his life, and Zarathustra took the role of Ahura Mazda much further than in the past. He proclaimed that Ahura Mazda was the one true God, uncreated, the creator of all that is good. This was revolutionary. It was the first crack at monotheism that we know about.

But there was more. Zarathrustra had been preoccupied as a young priest by the problems of injustice in the world, and the harshness of life. His answer to this, inspired by his visions, was to separate entirely the good of Ahura Mazda, from evil. Ahura Mazda was entirely good, and there was one evil power, called Angra Mainyu, the adversary, the Hostile Spirit. These were twin entities who each decided their role and their fate. Thus was set up the battleground of reality, with life and goodness set against the hostile force of not-life and adversity. By decoupling good and evil, Zarathustra found and answer to what is called theodicy – that big old problem of why there is evil, why bad things happen to good people, why people sometimes do terrible things. Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyueach had their forces ranked behind them. Ahura Mazda had the great Immortals and the personifications of virtues, many of them the deities from the previous religion. Ranked behind Angra Mainyu were the daevas, the gods of the Vedic cultures who were now unmasked as demons. The Cosmic War had begun.

But there was more. Just as Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu chose their fates, so do humans. Humans choose all the time, life over not-life, good over evil. All humans have this grave and noble responsibility, not just the priests, not just those who buy many sacrifices in order to cross the narrow bridge. Even women. Even enslave people. We are all able to attain paradise by dedicating our lives to Ahura Mazda and doing good. We all earn the right to cross the narrow bridge and enter paradise. We are all also responsible for our part in the Cosmic War.

It is hard to explain what this means. It is of course hard to work our how much this was a break from the past. But I am trying to set our how deeply this affected the lives of everyday people. First, you matter. You, as an individual, you matter. You have a part to play in the Cosmic War. Your choices matter. I think we can trace our own culture’s emphasis on individualism from this moment. Those who followed Zarathustra’s teachings came to believe that they mattered, that religious life was not just for priests. What they believed and what was in their hearts mattered. Doing good became internalized. I guess this was also the beginning of the idea that God knows what is in our hearts. We cannot hide our intentions or our secrets from a God who has enlisted us in the Cosmic War. Prior to that, gods were interested in liturgy and sacrifice: people gave, and gods gave back. This was a new god, who was interested in hearts and minds. This new god was much more omniscient.

It was clear what doing good was. Zoroastrians are clear about this even today. There are brief prayers five times a day, seven festivals a year. There is one prayer made by Zarathustra himself, and other prayers for different occasions. There is a fixed liturgy. For our purposes, here is the rather lovely end of the Zoroastrian creed, which is recited daily:

“I pledge myself to the well-thought thought, I pledge myself to the well-spoken word, I pledge myself to the well-performed act. I pledge myself to the Mazda-worshipping religion, which ….is righteous, which of all (faiths) which are and shall be is the greatest, the best, the most beautiful, which is Ahuric, Zoroastrian.”

So if you are a Zoroastrian you know what to do: well-thought thoughts, well-spoken words, and well-performed acts. It was, again, revolutionary, because this was for everybody. And it was profoundly moral in a way that religion had not been before, and it was possible for everyone, and it was meaningful, and it made for a more unified society.

But there was more. Ahura Mazda created the world in two stages, the spiritual or immaterial, and after that, the material. The material creation is superior; Ahura Mazda’s creation is perfect. This world was created perfect. However, Angra Mainyu immediately broke into it and attacked it, causing death and blight. Now, the world is experiencing what is called the “mixture”, where the forces of Angra Mainyu are constantly trying to destroy it and the forces of Ahura Mazda are fighting back. Humans also share this role or trying to restore the world to its original perfect state; we have this is common with the divine forces of good. We are the allies of the gods. However, this mixed state will not last for long. Soon will come the “separation” when good and evil will be separated, evil will be vanquished completely, and an endless time of perfection will exist, with divine beings and humans living with Ahura Mazda in peace and joy for ever.

Zarathustra’s teachings about the afterlife are also revealing as to the Cosmic War. Those devoted to Angra Mainyu will go to hell, a place of torment. This seems to have been Zarathustra’s own thing. There was no idea of hell prior to him. Pure souls go to paradise, where they live a happy life full of the good things of the senses, until the final days. Then, there will be a last judgment, a fiery ordeal for the wicked, a last battle after which Angra Mainyu will be destroyed, and everyone will become immortal.

Now, the “soon” thing became problematic after a while. And we will see it becomes a problem in all religions with this kind of eschatology, this idea of the end of the world coming soon. Not long after the death of Zarathustra, his followers became concerned that the Separation and the end of days had not happened yet. They focused on Zarathustra’s hints that a person would follow him who would be their world saviour, called the Saoshyant, who will lead humanity in its final battle against evil. A legend grew up that the Saoshyant would be the son of a virgin who had bathed in a lake that contained the seed of Zarathustra himself. The final battle would be not just the gradual elimination of evil by the ongoing striving of spiritual and material beings, but a cataclysmic event. Think Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the way we think about the end of the world. This is where that idea started. And it is more topical than you might think. Some influential Christian and Jewish people are even now trying to hasten the end of the world, because their religious thinking teaches them that the sooner it happens, the sooner we get the return of Christ, or the Messiah, and the sooner we can have a perfect world, where funnily enough they were proved right all along.

Although the idea of the world saviour was not the actual teaching of Zarathustra, it gained a lot of traction in Zoroastrian thought. You can understand how, because we are now in familiar religious territory. Sons of virgins, final battles, fiery ordeals, the end of the world, and so on. It also illustrates how it is not just the original teachings of a great founder of a religion, but the myths and Stories that arise afterwards, that inform the Stories we tell today. Folklore lasts longer than religion proper. Magic lasts longer that religion proper. Still true. 

Zarathustra’s religion is still around today. There aren’t many Zoroastrians, and most of them live in India. Zoroastrianism itself underwent many changes. It travelled from norther Iran down to the Levant and into northeast Asia, and took on new cultural forms as it went. But its influence has been enormous. We owe to Zoroastrianism our ideas about individual salvation, the devil, the last judgement, the world saviour, the end of the world, the importance of individual religious morality, the codification of right behaviour, heaven and hell, and the idea of revealed religion with one divinely-appointed founder. If it wasn’t for Zarathustra’s revelation, we would not be fighting the Cosmic War. And it we weren’t fighting the Cosmic War, we wouldn’t have a heap of other ideas that have made us what we are today.

So, that was a rollicking romp through many thousands of years, and there is of course a lot more to Zoroastrianism. It is quite hard to research, but I recommend the work of Mary Boyce, Jenny Rose, and the awesome Joseph Peterson with his avesta.org website.

If you stayed until the end, thank you, and I look forward to your company next time. Ma te wa!