History & overview · every faith gets one
Good thoughts, good words, good deeds — the oldest war on evil.
The religion of Zarathustra: one wise Lord, a real adversary, and every human drafted into the war between truth and the lie by their own choices. Its endgame — judgment, resurrection, a world made new — became the template the Abrahamic faiths inherited.
The founding
A priest of the old sacrificial religion had a vision of Ahura Mazda and began to preach a moral cosmos: existence as a battlefield of truth against the lie, with free human choice as the decisive weapon.
Its founding is bound to Zarathustra (Zoroaster) — c. 1200 BCE.
What it holds
Reality. Good creation, contested by a real adversary — and the war has a winner.
The divine. Ahura Mazda alone is worshipped, and the tradition is emphatic that he did not make evil — Angra Mainyu is an uncreated opponent, not a subordinate. Beneath Ahura Mazda stand the six Amesha Spentas, who are attributes of him and also persons, each with a piece of creation in their care; below them the yazatas, beings worthy of worship, of whom Mithra, Anahita and Sraosha have the largest followings. Whether this is monotheism, dualism or something the categories do not fit has been argued since the Greeks, and Zoroastrians generally answer that it is monotheism with a real enemy..
Death and after. The Chinvat bridge — judgment, then the House of Song or of Lies.