Reformation or major split-off of Zoroastrianism?

Why is everyone throwing around the term 'Zurvanism' when in point of fact, Zurvanism lost to Mazdaism under the Sassanids?

Neither lost to each other I'm not sure where you got that notion. However, Zurvanism did disappear after the Sassanids during the Arab conquests and the remaining Zoroastrianists were actually Mazdaists.
 

Zioneer

Banned
Why is everyone throwing around the term 'Zurvanism' when in point of fact, Zurvanism lost to Mazdaism under the Sassanids?

Not quite. Originally, Mazdaism did win out. However, Zurvanism had a royal sanction under the Sassanids.

Anyways, I think it'd fit for this new religion to keep the veneration of fire as Ahura Mazda's will on earth.
 
The fire cult was started by the Achemenids, how replaced traditional prayer in front of the fireplace with fire temples.

Why is everyone throwing around the term 'Zurvanism' when in point of fact, Zurvanism lost to Mazdaism under the Sassanids?
The Sassanid kings were themselves Zurvanists. After the Arab conquest, the Irani and Parsi were orthodox Zoroastrians, but later, with the help of Anglican apologists, they gravitated once again toward Zurvanism.
 

Kosta

Banned
Yes. A few did, but these were people that were more missing the point. I do believe the Persian Epic Shahnameh has a small passage about the fire worshippers, and they're pretty much regarded as heretics. Then again, Ferdowsi was speaking from a Zurvanist point of view as that was all he had to work with, considering the Sassanids did a good job of annihilating previous records.


Ah ha! So it was just like the Icon-crisis post Islamic-Conquests. What happened with the concept of fire; don't the surviving Zoroastrians of the present have fire-temples, fire-priests and the like?
 

Zioneer

Banned
Ah ha! So it was just like the Icon-crisis post Islamic-Conquests. What happened with the concept of fire; don't the surviving Zoroastrians of the present have fire-temples, fire-priests and the like?

I think so, but as a few people have said, the fire "worship" mentioned in the chronicles was a bit of a corruption/Greek authors misleading people.

Anyway, I'm still interested in this idea of a prophet of a split-off of Zoroastrianism, and I'm still tinkering with how the messiah system will work.

Anyone have any further ideas?
 
Zoroastrianism was a very advanced religion, even compared to today. It had the ideas of morality, justice, heaven and hell, free will, and the struggle for good and evil. At this time most religions had no concept of morality but, rather, one found favor with the gods by poffering them sacrifices and material goods. This is the very thing Zoroaster rejected when he rejected the Daevas.

And I fail to see the superiority of monotheism over dualism. Zurvanism (Zoroastrian Monotheism) almost destroyed the faith.

For it time, and perhaps even today, Zoroastrianism was a very advanced religion.
This is definitely something I need to take back. Of course monotheism is better than dualism. And I called myself Christian back then...:mad:

Then you'll have an endless chain of prophetic pretenders.
Almost like the Abrahamic faiths.

I hope no one saw this as me denying Christ.
 
In its original form Zoroastrianism was barely a monotheistic religion and was a small religion in Fars, that no one else actually believed in.

Well in its original form Christianity was just a small cult in the levant mainly made up of the poor and disenfranchised jews, religions evolve and change.
 
Zioneer,
why not Mazdakism? If you want a grassroots Zoroastrianism, there`s nothing better than Mazdakism. A successful social revolutionary movement is what could have found ample resonance in the Chinese and Arab world, too, at the time. (Islam was one, too.)

ImmortalImpi,
dangerously extremist? On the contrary, I would say that all the autocracies of 500 CE were dangerously extremist. Look at the mess they made, warring with each other, devolving the functions of the classical state to petty aristocratic tyrants, squandering the infrastructural, technological and philosophical state of development, being unable to withstand the onslaught of nomads.

Mazdakists could either have overthrown the rule of the Sassanids, or merely strengthened its more progressive-minded members like Kavadh. Either way, by pressing for a more egalitarian outlook, they might have broadened the foundation of support for the state of Eranshahr. Around 500, the time for a more political world religion was ripe. Centuries of otherworldly redemptorist sects had preceded it, and lost their innocence with the installation of Christianity as the state religion in Rome/Byzantium, Aksum, Armenia, without bringing the "community of saints" any nearer.
 
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