Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 12:11:38 -0500
From: James Jordan 
Subject: Re: (urth) latro and ares

At 12:21 PM 5/8/2003, you wrote:
>On Thu, 2003-05-08 at 09:16, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> > Mark wrote in part...
> >
> >> I am especially interested in the almost random manner in which
> >> Wolfe associates Ares with Ahura Mazda, the singular God that embodies 
> good
> >> as opposed to the plurality of lesser deities that proliferate on Olympos.
>
> > Slight correction ... Ahura-Mazda (Ormuzd, other spellings) is not a
> > "singular" god but one-half of a dualistic pair; the other being, of 
> course,
> > Ahriman, the god of Evil. The prophecies of Zarathustra suggest that
> > Ahura-Mazda will be victorious in the final battle, but since
> > everything else in the religion posits them as opposite equals,
> > I've never quite understood how that's supposed to work out.
>
>It's not quite accurate. Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion.
>
>Check out www.avesta.org.
>
>
>
>J.

         Whatever Z. may be now, or may have been in the 1st century, the 
question is what it was in Latro's day. Given the friendliness of the 
Persian rulers to the Jews, it seems that ur-Zoroastrians may have thought 
they were worshipping the same God under different names. Reading the works 
of Zarathustra, one wonders if he had not been influenced by diaspora Jews. 
Recall, for instance, that Yahweh manifests Himself in fire on the altar, 
and Z. sees fire as the manifestation of A-M. And there are other 
interesting things. No way to prove it, of course.
         The question is whether Wolfe thinks this so or not, and it is 
worth considering that he might.

Nutria


--