Zoroastrians make a comeback in northern Iraq
reuters.com
reuters.com
I suspect this "Yasna association" and their placement of a Reuters article are both efforts by Kurdish nationalists to draw members to their cause. In this case, people who happen to have some negative feelings about Islam after the recent series of conflicts might find a fused religious-nationalist appeal more interesting than a nationalist appeal alone.
In any case it's hard to see why this is news -- or how it in any way relates to Zoroastrianism as it exists in Iran and India.
It's fascinating! The "psycho-history" style preservation, and indeed flourishing, in Contemporary America of endangered cultures of the Ancient East.
We see a bit of it with ex-pat Turkish communities thriving in NY & PA. And I suspect with the recent influx of Afghan refugees we'll see a renaissance in ancient sources of Pashtun tradition, once freed from the shackles of mythos, and able to engage in free inquiry into their exegesis.
ML of "dead" language corpora is key. It was instrumental in decoding Syriac texts. And I suspect data mining of insights into ancient wisdom and digital archeology advances will only uncover more truth, more controversy. "Is this the real Islam" indeed!
Zoroastrian Global Glossary
That Zoroastrianism is seeing a resurgence is good news for Zoroastrians everywhere. The religion is dying as we speak, due to a low birth rate.
As someone who doesn't know much about the whole thing, your dismissal comes off as an equally fake news'ish dismissal meant to create a diversion.
It is my opinion that the group described in this piece probably recruits people for Kurdish nationalist causes. Lucky for them that Reuters picked it up.
Currently, the Zoroastrian Parsi community in India is in danger of rapid decline due to abysmal fertility rates. It’s something that Hindu nationalists are rather concerned about, but it’s hard to reverse demographic decline even with government support. Increasing outmarriages by Parsis won’t help things either.
Additionally, Hindu nationalism is driven by a perceived need to defend against religions that seek to convert the world (namely, Christianity and Islam). As such, Zoroastrianism is seen as a religion that needed sheltering from Islam.
Finally, specifically to the fertility rate issue, there is often fear amongst Hindu nationalists that differences in fertility rates will lead to Islamic demographic ascendancy, so it's natural to apply the same logic to the declining Parsi community.
That seems mathematically sound. What am I missing?
In other words, if demographic balance was really the concern the most effective proven way to address it would be to invest heavily in education and healthcare in the community with above-average fertility. But instead the proposed policies always insist on more and harsher crackdowns on the minority group, which will be counterproductive at best.
The fact that a correlation between religion and fertility rates is completely bollocks (with the notable exceptions of some extremist/fundamentalist sects of Christianity such as Quiverfull and Amish as well as fringes of the Jewish Ultra-Orthodox movement). High reproduction rates are closely linked to poverty [1], and once wealth rises in a country or people migrate from poor/high-rate countries, birth rates drop accordingly [2].
Additionally, it's a simple numbers game. The US only has 1% of Muslim faith [3], the European continent has ~7.5% [4] Muslims (of which 2/3rds belong to Russia and Turkey - the European Union figure is ~3.3%), even India barely has 13% [5]. It's mathematically impossible for Islam to achieve dominance in any country it doesn't already have by population in any feasible time scale, especially as religious affiliation in general keeps dropping and dropping associated again with wealth and education levels.
In general, the "the Muslims will replace us demographically!!!" take is dominantly found on the far-right end of the political spectrum, with the worst of the worst being the virulently anti-semitic "great replacement" theory that alleges that a "new world order" led by Jews wants to "replace" the intelligent White Christian population with dumb Muslims [6]. Please, don't fall for that kind of baseless, vile propaganda.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/aug/25/h...
[2]: https://www.knomad.org/sites/default/files/2020-01/Migration...
[3]: https://www.pewforum.org/2021/01/14/measuring-religion-in-pe...
[4]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Europa#Statistik
[5]: https://www.bpb.de/internationales/asien/indien/44418/muslim...
[6]: https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/the-great-replac...
I assume you're talking about the Parisian "banlieues", Berlin-Neukölln and similar areas? These ghettos are the result of a mixture of gentrification and (decades of) ethnic discrimination... basically, what happens is:
First, many immigrants take up low-paid jobs in society because of language barriers or un-recognized qualification documents [1] or because of ethnic discrimination in hiring [2]. That means they are restricted to social/cheap housing by their low income.
These housing situations (sometimes quickly) deteriorate in a phenomenon called "white flight", which leads to a vicious cycle of discrimination by city quarter [3] and everyone who is able to fleeing, leading to a collapse in rents and a subsequent rise in migrant and "down on their luck" (i.e. criminals and other people unable to find regular housing) people. In the end, the government and its services as well as economy (e.g. supermarkets, small shops, ...) also retreats from such areas, leading to further decline. The people left behind then go and self-organize - some in positive forms such as ethnic grocery exports/imports stores, some in negative forms such as crime gangs.
The ethnic discrimination, especially against the young second- or third-generation migrants, also leads to a rise in gang-related crime: when schools fail to educate them, the employment market discriminates against them and cultural icons glorify a life of crime or crime is the only way to make a living without depending on social security, way too many choose the way of joining a gang.
The crime then invites politicians, usually from the Conservative to far-right, to call for "law and order" tactics from police, which leads to an increase of discrimination by police, a further split between the immigrant and indigenous population and sometimes outright ethnic riots (the London 2011 riots began with the killing of a Black suspect by police, the Paris 2005 riots began with the death of two immigrant youth who fled from police in fear of lengthy "interrogations", and the BLM-associated riots were triggered by George Floyd being murdered by police).
And historically, governments haven't exactly had a track record combatting the early signs of gentrification or ghettoization... which makes all the crying and complaining about "segregation", "parallel cultures" etc. when something happens (such as the mentioned riots, or the gang murder spree in Sweden) a bit cynical. The policies of the Conservative and far-right politicians created the very same problems they are now complaining about.
[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/oecd-eu-studie-besonders-vie...
[2]: https://www.spiegel.de/lebenundlernen/schule/auslaendische-v...
[3]: https://www.bpb.de/politik/innenpolitik/stadt-und-gesellscha...
It's the very opposite of what a serious policy aimed at mitigating social and economic inequality should look like, but Big Government ideology is widespread enough in France that any reform is quite unthinkable there. (Germany used to be in the same boat, but they enacted reforms in the early 2000s that provided for some degree of much-needed flexibility for these marginalized workers. It's not a full UBI or even an EITC equivalent, but it's a tiny start.)
Both go together hand-in-hand, you cannot have gentrification without an area that picks up those driven out by it.
> and the lower-skilled end of the labor market is the one that bears the greatest burden by far from the kind of onerous labor regulation and taxation that is especially common in France.
> Germany used to be in the same boat, but they enacted reforms in the early 2000s that provided for some degree of much-needed flexibility for these marginalized workers.
When comparing the employment sector in France and in Germany where the Schröder government introduced the infamous "Hartz IV" reforms in 2006, one clear thing pops out: France has a significantly lower rate of ultra-low-wage employment (8.6%) compared to Germany (20.7%). The "flexibility" only helped the ultra-low-wage employment sector to explode, a trend that only got reversed in the last few years before COVID hit [2].
[1]: https://www.destatis.de/Europa/DE/Thema/Bevoelkerung-Arbeit-...
[2]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/161881/umfrag...
Some European countries already have a plurality of births to migrant groups, I think the figure is better than 20% for Spain and France- so even if fertility euqalizes its a big demographic event considering the timescale.
Spain has 10% people with migration history. It will take a lot of generations for that to change in a major way simply with fertility - and after three or four generations, it's hardly fair to call these people migrants anyway. In the US, a second-generation migrant became the 44th President and a third-generation migrant became the 45th President.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrant_generations
[2]: https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/pages/glossary/second-gene...
[3]: https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/abstimmungen...
The kid of a Zoroastrian mother and non-Zoroastrian father is also not considered to be Zoroastrian.
I'd want to understand why some Zoroastrians hold that view, before claiming that it's incorrect.
It's a combination of conservatism and patriarchy at the religious leadership level. Originally, the rules were clear for either gender: If a Zoroastrian married outside the faith, their child was not Zoroastrian anymore. However, certain influential families were able to gain acceptance for children where the father was Zoroastrian and the mother was not. The priests, however, refused to accept the converse, even though most children learn to practice their faith from their mothers.
This issue has bifurcated the community between the conservatives who agree with the priests, and liberals who support Zoroastrians marrying outside the community. Zoroastrians are largely Westernized, ergo women are educated, have careers and choose their own spouses, and women have long since complained that this system is unfair to them. Some priests, particularly in North America, UK and Australia, are espousing the liberal philosophy and will conduct the initiation ceremony for any child as long as one spouse is Zoroastrian.
In addition, there are also those who feel the situation is dire enough such that conversions should be allowed again.
A child of a Jewish mother and a Zoroastrian father would belong to both religions.
Also isn't 'belonging' to given religion done in some form of baptism or other introduction to it?
In other words, he chose the name because it represented exactly the mentality he wanted to overcome.
(I know next to nothing about Zoroastrianism, but Nietzsche was not big on religion.)
While a definitive explanation for it has not been made, I think the biggest reason for it is as the article explains, in that these older traditions is a lot more open and flexible ironically enough because it's been the only way for it to be taken serious in modern times (in essence that the myths and legends are merely stories or fair tales told to teach a certain concept).
But also because these old religions is much less of a burden for the believer both in terms of what a "good" believer is but also because lack of clashes with society's expectations and norms.
I think the comparison between the old and new forms of Christianity you're making is a bit ... mistaken. It's hard to say the older forms require less from their believers than the protestant sects do.
A lot of the Christianity in western Europe has had quite the reformation to accommodate new norms in society.
(I don't like Vidal's writing, which I find to be mostly attitude, but YMMV.)
I'm only interested in the origin and meaning of the sokratic paradox and am hopeful that it has a prehistory. Did you know that οὐκ, which may be translated as "not", is composed of (un-) + ever + what (a pattern also seen in Maltesen for negation), so one of the associated quotes could be read as "I know ever-what knowing". English and German wikipedia present this slightly differently, it is confusing. See wiktionary yourself for the alleged etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CE%BA
Do you folks in the west offer diversity funding to Zoroastrian founders? We are provably a dying breed.
Sample case - buddhist armies conquering places like Ladakh in distant past. or a bitter merciless civil war between buddhist majority and hindu minority in Sri Lanka where both sides committed atrocities.
Islam is very tolerant at its core, but many religions are twisted badly from their original intents, power/violence craving individuals being able to find alternative interpretations to many well-intended ideas.
According to Awat Taieb, co-founder of the Yasna association that since 2014 has promoted Zoroastrianism in Kurdistan and also representative of the faith at the Kurdistan government, about 15,000 people registered with the organisation so far.
For instance, it may be appealing to say Christianity has drawn from the zoroastrian idea of a good and bad after life and final judgment, but we find those themes in Egyptian religion as well... Additionally, the resurrection of the dead is a development of Judaism that happened relatively late and was denied by various sects in antiquity but became mainstreamed in Christianity and modern orthodox judaism.
I tend to view the opening of genesis as being a take-down of prior creation myths from other cultures in the region, but I'm unaware of exactly the same story in any of them.
The accreation mythos went through multiple and severe editing during the Akkadian times under the reigning Akkadian priests so as to completely remove the Hebrews from the Egyptian pantheistic influence. This became the creation myth of the OT.. Parashah B'reshit.
The Canaanites(includes the Hebrews) managed to keep some parts of the Baal cycle mythos but mostly relied on the stories from Akkadian priests.
The Akkadian Mythology itself runs parallel to the Hittite and Chaldean creation myths. Their origins are lost suggesting that there were even older creation myths from which they derived their own narrative mythology.
For example..look at Tiamat (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiamat ), a salt water sea dragon/serpent who is sibling of Apsu (fresh water). Tiamat was later killed by Marduk who used her parts to create the other worlds. Marduk (storm god), the son of Enki(water god).
Genesis follows the same story structure up until the flood myth and the ark. So Hebrew creation mythos/Genesis was definitely derivative and also underwent multiple edits and rewritten over the centuries.
Ref: https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ : The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature
it's common to interpret the structure of genesis as being a riff off of earlier myths, in a critical way. The structure is often parallel, but also often different as though to draw a comparison to the mind of the reader. We see a harmonious creation account rather than a violent one, and a creator God who is master over both earth and water.
Anyone who studied religion at an undergraduate level (or at a good highschool) knows this. The specific narrative you're weaving is , however, highly speculative.
It should not surprise Christians or jews that the ancient Israelites recognized other gods, this is covered extensively in the Bible. There are frequent references to the 'God's of the nations' in the old testament, particularly evident in the greek.
The existnece of miltiple lower case G 'gods' - is still held in even the New Testament 'principalities and powers' are 'gods over the nations'. I think, it is fair to say that modern jews and Christians alike still hold this to be true.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Modern-Pagans-Outlined-E...
[1] https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/XLVII/4/557/7...
Vedic Mitra was invoked along with other Vedic gods as far away as current day Syria/Turkey
[..] Indic Mitra is first attested in a 14th century BCE Mitanni inscription in which an Indo-Aryan king of Mitanni invokes the gods Mitra, Indra, Varuna, and the Nasatyas as guarantors of his sworn obligations.[..]
Also in the treaties signed by Mittanis and the Hittites.
Mitra always appears with Varuna. In the beginning of Rig Veda, Varuna is the king of the Vedic gods and is resplendent and benevolent..but towards the end, he loses his luster and becomes a minor god..mean, dull and almost cruel as Indra becomes the new head after slaying Ahi , the serpent demon who captured Apas, the water goddess(apam-napat or apa also appears as a Zoroastrian deity)
One theory is that this event of Indra rescuing apa from ahi by releasing her frozen waters(ahi froze the waters and indira used his lightning bolt/thunderbolt weapon vajra to melt the ice so she will flow down back from the frozen state) can be times to one of the ice ages ..and younger dryas event + the sedimentation layer might have been after that..which would have been due to thehastened melting of the ice when the comets burned down..causing the ‘great flooding’..an event that is recorded in every world mythology.
Back to Ahura Mazda/Varuna split.. there were two priests classes..brighus and angiras..angiras took some books and went east..the brighus kept some of the Bhargava texts. Even today, the Vedas are bit complete and many parts of it are considered ‘lost’
Shri Jatindra Mohan Chatterji argues that Zend Avesta is the Bhargava Veda text. He asserts that the Bhargava Veda the missing Book of the Bhrigu Angirasa Samhita (The Hymns of Atharvan Zarathustra – Published by The Parsi Zoroastrian Association, Calcutta, 1967).
The Indo-Iranians likely became divided because of differences in opinion about methods of worship and accent on certain principles. Likely leading to the split of the original Aryan land into India and Iran..east of river Sindhu became the land of Hindus.
This is unlikely, as the the Vedas were composed after the Indian-Iranian split, and the last common ancestor of Avestan and Vedic is much before that.
As for the serpent motive, I think it relates to the movement and shape of glaciers. Here are some pictures.
Snake-like path of a swiss glacier: [1]
The end of a glacier which (with skimming) may look like a snake head releasing streams of melt water: [2]
In these ~110 year old illustrations glaciers are depicted with weird lion head and sluggish lizard body: [3]
Ahi seems to be Azi Dahâka in Zoroastrianism, which also has a lot of long-winter themes [4]:
"The world was imagined as lasting a long year of twelve millenniums. There had been an old myth, connected with that notion, which made the world end in a frightful winter, to be succeeded by an eternal spring, when the blessed would come down from the Vara of Yima to repeople the earth. But as storm was the ordinary and more dramatic form of the strife, there was another version, according to which the world ended in a storm, and this version became the definitive one.
The serpent, Azi Dahâka, let loose, takes hold of the world again. As the temporary disappearance of the light was often mythically described either as the sleeping of the god, or as his absence, or death [...]"
This story about the Vara is also super interesting and similar to the Ark story, though not with a big flood but a long winter and "foul frost". The numbers make more sense, because they gather over a thousand "seeds of men and women" instead of only a single family. [5]
[1] https://www.swisseduc.ch/glaciers/glossary/valley-glacier-en...
[2] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CTPcUSfYG3c/maxresdefault.jpg
[3] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/02/culture-history...
Thank you. The links are very helpful.
The flood myth in Vedic Hindu mythology is called Pralaya..the Great Dissolution. [..] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pralaya
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuga_Cycle [..] A Yuga Cycle (a.k.a. chatur yuga, maha yuga, etc.) is a cyclic age (epoch) in Hindu cosmology. Each cycle lasts for 4,320,000 years (12,000 divine years[a]) and repeats four yugas (world ages): Krita (Satya) Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga, and Kali Yuga.
As a Yuga Cycle progresses through the four yugas, each yuga's length and humanity's general moral and physical state within each yuga decrease by one-fourth. Kali Yuga, which lasts for 432,000 years, is believed to have started in 3102 BCE. Near the end of Kali Yuga, when virtues are at their worst, a cataclysm and a re-establishment of dharma occur to usher in the next cycle's Satya Yuga, prophesied to occur by Kalki.
There are 71 Yuga Cycles in a manvantara (age of Manu) and 1,000 Yuga Cycles in a kalpa (day of Brahma).[..]
At the end of the 4 ages, Seven Sages will save the Vedas to pass it on to the next edition of the universe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saptarishi : [..] At the end of every four ages there is a disappearance of the Vedas and it is the province of the seven Rishis to come down upon earth from heaven to give them currency.[..]
All other life and the universe is Maya or illusion. Even the Gods are gone. They too were part of the illusion.
Only Brahman remains. This formless attributeless universal consciousness will restart creation after every great dissolution. Everything is part of Brahman and Brahman is part of everything. This cycle of creation and dissolution is endless.