Glimpses of the Fathomless Mysteries of Zoroaster

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Alexander Wilder · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 26 pages

Twenty-six pages in parts, with a contents page and abstract of central ideas. It was revised in November 2024. *The claim it opens with reorganises the whole subject*, and a reader should have it before anything else in the file.

That claim is that Zoroaster is a generic title rather than the name of one man. There were several prophets of that name, as there were several bearers of the name Thoth-Hermes — the Dabistan alone enumerating thirteen Zarathushtras or Zertusts — though these are held to be reincarnations of the first. From that follows a chronology quite unlike the textbook one: it was on the continent of Atlantis that Zarathushtra became the law-giver and ruler of the Fourth Race, and the last Zarathushtra, of the Desatir, compiled the Vendidad. A careful distinction is then drawn about what he founded — the Magian religion, and a reform of magic as practised by the Chaldeans and old Egyptians, but not Divine Magic or theurgy, which is treated as older still. A short historical passage describes the prehistoric Zoroastrian Gheber temple of Baku as a study centre for generations of Zoroastrian hermits overseen by a High Mobed. The chain of borrowing set out next is the file's most compressed statement of its own method: the Zoroastrians, the Mazdeans and the Persians borrowed their conceptions from India; the Jews borrowed their theory of angels from Persia; and the Christians borrowed theirs from the Jews. A table of the pivotal attributes of the first four root-races is given at that point. The second part turns to the dualism Zoroastrianism is best known for, and denies that it was there at the start — the earliest Zoroastrians, it argues, did not believe in evil or darkness being co-eternal with good or light — with a supporting identification of the Hebrew Elohim as forces and generative powers of nature involved only in material creation, and identical with the Aryan Asuras.

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