Zoroaster

Zoroaster, also called Zarathustra, was the Iranian prophet who founded the religion that bears his name. His dates are among the most contested in the history of religion: linguistic analysis of the Gathas, the archaic hymns attributed to him, leads many scholars (following Mary Boyce) to place him between roughly 1500 and 1000 BCE, while a competing tradition derived from later Pahlavi sources gives dates around 628-551 BCE, and other scholars favor a window between 900 and 400 BCE.

This entry follows the earlier, linguistically grounded range while noting calmly that the question remains genuinely open and that the historical and the legendary Zarathustra are difficult to disentangle. His teaching reframed the older Iranian polytheism around Ahura Mazda, the “Wise Lord,” and a cosmic struggle between truth (asha) and the lie (druj), good and evil, in which each person’s choices have real weight.

Central to this atlas is Vohu Manah, the “Good Mind” - one of the beneficent immortals (amesha spentas) and, in the tradition’s account, the very faculty through which Zarathustra was conducted into the presence of the Wise Lord.

This atlas tags Zoroaster as “gnosticism” because Zoroastrianism has no exact tag among the available traditions; the fit is loose and approximate, chosen because Zoroastrian dualism and its drama of light against darkness deeply shaped the later Gnostic and Manichaean streams.