Zarathustra’s Influence

The full extent of the influence of Zarathustra is beyond the scope of a blog post. However, a look at his influence, directly and indirectly, upon Western thought will prove to illuminate.

 According to Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras, the Pythagorean tradition held that their founder, Pythagoras, had studied with Zoroaster, the Greek name for Zarathustra, in Babylonia. Zoroaster appears in the Platonic Dialog of First Alcibiades, the standard introductory text of Platonism. There he is mentioned concerning the heritage of the Persians whom the Greeks had been at war not long before Plato’s writings.

According to Pliny the Elder, in the 1st Century CE, Zoroaster had become the figure believed by the Greeks to have invented magic. During the same period, Plutarch refers in Isis and Osiris to “Zoroaster the Magus.” After this, various texts related to magical practice and Astrology would circulate through the Hellenic World under the attribution of Zoroastrian or his traditions’ Priesthood, the Magi.

 Zarathustra’s teachings were largely unknown in the post-Classical West. He became a figure of myth associated with lost wisdom and magic. In the 18th Century, Zoroaster became a subject of interest to various figures of the Enlightenment. Voltaire suggested him as a potential model for Deism. Mozart created the character of Sarastro in Die Zauberflote after the image of Zoroaster.

 A century later, Friedrich Nietzsche would return to the name Zarathustra for his myth of the Death of God and the transvaluation of all values in Also Sprach Zarathustra. In a sense, this text can be seen as an early indicator of the closing of the Age defined by the Axial realizations. It was no coincidence that Nietzsche would choose the originator of those realizations to proclaim their Age’s end.