Zoroaster

95:6.4Zoroaster did not teach the wor­ship of fire but sought to uti­lize the flame as a sym­bol of the pure and wise Spirit of uni­ver­sal and su­preme dom­i­nance. (All too true, his later fol­low­ers did both rev­er­ence and wor­ship this sym­bolic fire.) Fi­nally, upon the con­ver­sion of an Ira­nian prince, this new re­li­gion was spread by the sword. And Zoroaster hero­ically died in bat­tle for that which he be­lieved was the “truth of the Lord of light.”

131:5.1Zoroaster was him­self di­rectly in con­tact with the de­scen­dants of the ear­lier Mel­chiz­e­dek mis­sion­ar­ies, and their doc­trine of the one God be­came a cen­tral teach­ing in the re­li­gion which he founded in Per­sia. Aside from Ju­daism, no re­li­gion of that day con­tained more of these Salem teach­ings. From the rec­ords of this re­li­gion Ga­nid made the fol­low­ing ex­cerpts:

92:5.124. The sixth cen­tury be­fore Christ. Many men arose to pro­claim truth in this, one of the great­est cen­turies of re­li­gious awak­en­ing ever wit­nessed on Uran­tia. Among these should be re­corded Gau­tama, Con­fu­cius, Lao-tse, Zoroaster, and the Jain­ist teach­ers. The teach­ings of Gau­tama have be­come wide­spread in Asia, and he is revered as the Bud­dha by mil­lions. Con­fu­cius was to Chi­nese moral­ity what Plato was to Greek phi­los­o­phy, and while there were re­li­gious reper­cus­sions to the teach­ings of both, strictly speak­ing, nei­ther was a re­li­gious teacher; Lao-tse en­vi­sioned more of God in Tao than did Con­fu­cius in hu­man­ity or Plato in ide­al­ism. Zoroaster, while much af­fected by the preva­lent con­cept of dual spiritism, the good and the bad, at the same time def­i­nitely ex­alted the idea of one eter­nal De­ity and of the ul­ti­mate vic­tory of light over dark­ness.

95:6.1From Pales­tine some of the Mel­chiz­e­dek mis­sion­ar­ies passed on through Mes­o­po­ta­mia and to the great Ira­nian pla­teau. For more than five hun­dred years the Salem teach­ers made head­way in Iran, and the whole na­tion was swing­ing to the Mel­chiz­e­dek re­li­gion when a change of rulers pre­cip­i­tated a bit­ter per­se­cu­tion which prac­ti­cally ended the mono­the­is­tic teach­ings of the Salem cult. The doc­trine of the Abra­hamic covenant was vir­tu­ally ex­tinct in Per­sia when, in that great cen­tury of moral re­nais­sance, the sixth be­fore Christ, Zoroaster ap­peared to re­vive the smoul­der­ing em­bers of the Salem gospel.

121:6.4Philo was a great teacher; not since Moses had there lived a man who ex­erted such a pro­found in­flu­ence on the eth­i­cal and re­li­gious thought of the Oc­ci­den­tal world. In the mat­ter of the com­bi­na­tion of the bet­ter el­e­ments in con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous sys­tems of eth­i­cal and re­li­gious teach­ings, there have been seven out­stand­ing hu­man teach­ers: Sethard, Moses, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, Bud­dha, Philo, and Paul.