Mazdaism
Mazdeism

Other names for Zoroastrianism are Mazdaism and Parsiism.

Why the cult of Zurvan vanished (while Mazdaism did not) remains again an issue of scholarly debate.

By the 10th century, Zurvanism had ceased to exist, leaving Mazdaism the sole remaining form of Zoroastrianism.

The Denkard is to a great extent an "Encyclopedia of Mazdaism" and is a most valuable source of information on the religion.

Shapur II also began systematically persecuting the local Christians by forcing apostasy to Mazdaism, a form of Orthodox Zoroastrianism.

It is however not known whether Sassanid era Zurvanism and Mazdaism were separate sects, each with their own organization and priesthood, or simply two tendencies within the same body.

Franz Cumont was the proponent of a now-unfashionable view that Greco-Roman Mithraism had been influenced by some beliefs of ancient Mazdaism, including ethical dualism.

The term Zoroastrianism is, in general usage, essentially synonymous with Mazdaism, i.e., the worship of Ahura Mazda, exalted by Zoroaster as the supreme divine authority.

This idea of "non-reality" is also expressed in other texts, such as the Denkard, a 9th-century "encyclopedia of Mazdaism", which states Ahriman "has never been and never will be."

The Medes had an Ancient Iranian Religion (a form of pre-Zoroastrian Mazdaism or Mithra worshipping) with a priesthood named as "Magi".

For example, Mazdaism (Mazdean Zoroastrianism) is both dualistic and monotheistic (but not monist by definition) since in that philosophy God-the Creator-is purely good, and the antithesis-which is also uncreated-is an absolute one.

Cumont's hypothesis, as the author summarizes it in the first 32 pages of his book, was that the Roman religion was "the Roman form of Mazdaism", the Persian state religion, disseminated from the East.

These divinities were worshipped in pre-Zoroastrian Mazdaism, and as in Vedic religions, the adherents of the pre-Zoroastrian form of Mazdaism considered the daēva holy and sacred beings.

He became the de facto Abbasid governor of Khorasan, and gained fame as a general in the late 740s in defeating the peasant rebellion of Bihafarid, the leader of a syncretic Persian sect that were Mazdaism.

The Islamization of Central Asia was due in significant part to the activities of the Samanids, and in Taraz, other pre-existing religions such as Mazdaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Tengrism were gradually replaced.

The Sassanid king Yazdegerd II passed an edict requiring all the Christians in his empire to convert to Mazdaism, fearing that Christians might ally with Roman Empire, which had recently adopted Christianity.

Ferdowsi's work draws heavily, with attribution, on the stories and characters of Mazdaism and Zoroastrianism, not only from the Avesta, but from later texts such as the Bundahishn and the Denkard as well as many others.

The pessimism evident in Zurvanite fatalism existed in stark contradiction to the positive moral force of Mazdaism, and was a direct violation of one of Zoroaster's great contributions to religious philosophy: his uncompromising doctrine of free will.

According to Gignoux, the section "is clearly nationalist and Persian in orientation," expressing a hope for the resurgence of Mazdaism and with it the restoration of Iranian ideals that the author perceives to have been corrupted by Arab influence.

Since almost all Muslims in China were exclusively foreign Arabs or Persians at the time, it was barely mentioned by the Chinese, unlike other religions like Zoroastrism, Mazdaism, and Nestorian Christianity which gained followings in China.

The probability is that all later associations with the symbol refer back to an early astrological origin (compare Mithras), the person so glorified being identified with the sun and represented in the sun's image; so the aureole is the Hvareno of Mazdaism.

That Mazdaism and Zurvanism competed for attention can been inferred from the works of Christian and Manichean polemicists, but the doctrinal incompatibilities were not so extreme "that they could not be reconciled under the broad aegis of an imperial church" (Boyce, 1957:308).

Gherardo Gnoli, in The Encyclopaedia of Religion, says that "we can assert that Manichaeism has its roots in the Iranian religious tradition and that its relationship to Mazdaism, or Zoroastrianism, is more or less like that of Christianity to Judaism".

Nonetheless, that Zurvanism was the predominant brand of Zoroastrianism during the cataclysmic years just prior to the fall of the empire, is, according to Duchesne-Guillemin, evident in the degree of influence that Zurvanism (but not Mazdaism) would have on the Iranian brand of Shi'a Islam.

It is suggested that from the 8th century BCE, a form of "Mazdaism with common Iranian traditions" existed in Media and the strict reforms of Zarathustra began to spread in western Iran during the reign of the last Median kings in 6th century BCE.

The March 2001 draft edition of the Oxford English Dictionary also records an alternate form, Mazdeism, perhaps derived from the French Mazdéisme, which first appeared in 1871.

Thus, "what will survive in popular conscience under the Muslim varnish is not Mazdeism: it is Zervanite fatalism, well attested in Persian literature" (Duchesne-Guillemin, 1956:109).