Here are excerpts from a speech tracing links between Anthroposophy and Zoroastrianism. The speaker, who identified himself as a Zoroastrian, has a distinctly favorable view of Anthroposophy. Indeed, despite disclaimers, the speaker might almost be taken as a proselytizer for Anthroposophy. See what you make of the speaker’s presentation.

You can find the complete text of the speech at  http://www.zoroastrian.org.uk/vohuman/Article/The%20Being%20Of%20Zarathushtra%20In%20The%20Light.htm.

(I have added a few links to pages that bear on matters raised in the speech. Click on the underlined words.)

The Being of Zarathustra

in the Light of Anthroposophy

Dear Friends and Fellow Zoroastrians: It is important that I mention right at the beginning of my talk that I am not speaking in the capacity of a research scholar or an authority on the subject of the Zoroastrian Religion, but as a lay-person, informing the listeners about a movement, a philosophy and a world-conception which deeply reveres the teachings of Zarathustra, and which has an approach to the subject which is different from the conventional approach....

At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century there lived an Austrian by the name of Rudolf Steiner. He was gifted with the rare combination of clairvoyance and highly developed scientific thinking ... Dr. Steiner had a close connection to, and was influenced by, the teachings of Zarathustra....

Zarathustra was the great initiate and spiritual leader of his people for his time. Every spiritual stream in the world has its particular mission [Steiner taught]. These streams are not isolated and are separated only during certain epochs; then they merge and mutually nourish each other. But conceptions of the world and life do not move through the air as pure abstractions. They are borne by Beings, by Individualities [i.e., spirits or gods]....

It was the Being of Zarathustra, his Individuality, which was destined to receive the spiritual and cultural impulses in ancient Persia and impart it to the people of his times and of times to come. So lofty was the stage of development of Zarathustra, that he could make provision in advance for the streams of culture which were to follow.

Occult research [i.e., Steiner’s use of "exact clairvoyance"] has shown how this has been possible ... Great initiates who have lived on earth in various epochs have had their pupils carry on their work in a different form in a later age because they could carry this knowledge with them from life to death into rebirth. This would have to be explained to those who do not believe in reincarnation....

It is this renewal which saves the religion or philosophy from dying out, or even worse, from hardening into a set of laws and dry theories which have no relevance to the life and times of present-day human beings striving for self-knowledge and an understanding of the world....

Anthroposophy as a spiritual science helps contemporary people to become aware of the spiritual side of earthly events....

For one born of Zoroastrian parents, basic knowledge of the Good Religion is acquired by means of stories, books, rituals and ceremonies. It is the bond of religious tradition, strengthened through active participation in religious ceremonies and prayers, that is maintained within the family and handed down from generation to generation....

...It was Zarathustra who showed the people of his times that the earth, if left barren and untended, would fall prey to the dark forces. For this reason agriculture, the culture of cultivating the earth so that it would become a bearer of the corn and the fruit which would grow by means of the light of the life-giving sun, the rain and the air, became the principle culture of our forefathers.

In this manner, the four elements combined to provide the human being with nourishment which would sustain him and help him to fight the good fight against the dark forces as represented by Ahriman. Through the intake of this food, the human being imbibes also the forces of the sun which free in him the light which vitalizes the knowledge and carries it into human life through right activity. But in our increasingly materialistic world, which is being dominated by Ahriman to an alarming degree, even agriculture has been adversely affected. Artificial chemical fertilizers, poisonous insecticides and lack of understanding of the advantages of crop rotation have damaged the living organism that is earth. Anthroposophy has recognized the working of Ahriman also in this sphere according to Zarathushtra's teachings and a new form of agriculture, bio-dynamic agriculture, has been developed which enables the farmer to cultivate the earth and grow corn and fruit without the dependence on destructive methods which the farming industry in present times so willingly employs. The idea is re-humanization in all spheres of active life by means of which the sun-being [i.e., the Sun God] can assert itself through the good deeds of consciousness. In this manner the power and influence of Ahriman recedes into the background.

Materialism, which kills all religious belief and feeling and which dehumanizes the human being, may not disappear completely, but can be dealt with or balanced out in this manner. Materialism is a necessity in modern times; it cannot be overlooked nor can it be denied. It is excessive materialism which binds and chains the human being to the domain of the Ahriman forces....

Steiner stresses the need of modern human beings not to take this ethical and cosmic battle as an abstract concept, but to recognize its reality through wakefulness, through consciousness. Right consciousness is the best weapon against Ahriman. It is this very wakeful consciousness which has the freedom to choose between the light forces, rather than choosing the narrow confines of hardened intellect which fail to transcend the world of the senses in all its limitations. Thus the ancient religion of Zarathustra has to be experienced anew and made relevant for all aspects of human life on earth....

You will agree with me when I say that our religion can be understood and practiced on many levels, depending upon the individual; it is a state of mind. I am sure there are no two Zoroastrians who have an identical understanding of the good religion and its practice, but that each one strives to the best of his efforts and abilities to realize in daily life by one's actions, what one thinks and feels, so that one's thoughts, words and deeds should be good and in harmony with the environment.

Zoroastrian devotional art

bearing traditional images of Zoroaster

or Zarathustra.

[Public domain imafe.]

Here are some of Steiner's teachings about Zarathustra and his doctrines:

Zarathustra lived at least eight thousand years before our present era, and the gifts to civilisation which poured from his enlightened spirit shine forth clearly across the centuries. Those who penetrate into the inner currents of human evolution can detect them even after this lapse of time. Zarathustra was one of those whose soul had experienced Truth, Wisdom and Intuition to an extent far transcending the normal consciousness of the age. In that part of the Earth which later on was known as the Persian Empire, Zarathustra proclaimed mighty truths from the super-sensible worlds — regions lying far above the normal consciousness of the men of that time.

If we would understand the significance of Zarathustra's teaching, we must realise that his mission was to communicate a certain conception of the universe to one particular section of humanity, while other streams had, as it were, a different mission in human culture. The personality of Zarathustra is all the more interesting to us in that he lived in a part of the world directly adjoining on its South side another land whose people transmitted an entirely different order of spirituality to mankind. I refer to the peoples of India, from whom arose the Vedic poets. The region permeated with the mighty impulse of Zarathustra lies to the North of the land from which the great teaching of Brahma went forth. Zarathustra's message to the world was fundamentally different from the Brahministic teachings of the great leaders of ancient Indian thought. These Indian teachings have come down to us in the Vedas, and in the profound philosophy of the Vedanta, of which the revelations of Buddha represent, as it were, the final splendour.

...Let us try to condense into simple language the doctrines which Zarathustra tried to inculcate into his disciples. He spoke thus: “Man, as we perceive him, is not merely composed of a physical body, for this physical body is but the outer manifestation of the Spirit. Just as the physical body is nothing but the manifested crystallisation of the Spiritual in man, so the Sun, in so far as it is a body of luminous matter, is nothing but the external body of a spiritual Sun.” The spiritual part of man is spoken of as the “Aura” — or “Ahura,” to use the old expression — in distinction to his physical body and in the same sense the spiritual part of the physical Sun may be called the “Great Aura,” for it is all-embracing. Zarathustra called that which lies behind the physical Sun, Aura Mazda or Ahura Mazdao — the Great Aura. With this spiritual essence behind the Sun, all spiritual experiences and conditions are bound up, just as the existence and well-being of plants, animals and all that lives on Earth are bound up with the physical Sun. Behind the physical Sun lives the spiritual Lord and Creator, Ahura Mazdao. This is the derivation of the name “Ormuzd,” Spirit of Light. While the Indians searched mystically in the inner self to find Brahma, the Eternal, shining like a luminous centre in man, Zarathustra pointed his disciples to the great periphery, showing them that the mighty Spirit of the Sun, Ahura Mazdao, the Spirit of Light, dwelt in the physical body of the Sun. Ahura Mazdao has to face his enemy — Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness — just as man, who bears within himself the enemies of his good impulses, strives to raise his real spiritual being to perfection and has to battle against his lower passions, desires, and the delusive images of lying and falsehood.

Zarathustra was able to transmute his conception of the universe from mere doctrine into real feeling, real vision. And so he was able to teach his disciples that within them was an active principle of perfection. Whatever their development might be at the time, they were taught to realise that this principle of perfection could raise them to higher and higher stages of existence. They were taught that passions and desires, lying and deceit within the soul lead to imperfection. Zarathustra taught of the attacks made upon Ahura Mazdao in the outer world by the principle of imperfection, by the evil which casts shadow into the light, by Angra Mainyus — Ahriman. 

Zarathustra's disciples were thus enabled to realise that the great universe is reflected in each individual. The real significance of this doctrine lay, not in its theoretical concepts and ideas but in the feeling it called forth in man — a feeling which taught him of his relationship to the universe and made him able to say: “Here I stand — a little world, but a little world which is a replica of the great world. In human beings, the principle of perfection is opposed by evil; in the great universe, Ormuzd and Ahriman face one another. The whole universe is, as it were, a man grown immeasurably great and the highest human forces are Ahura Mazdao — their enemy, Ahriman.”

— Rudolf Steiner, "Zarathustra", a lecture, 

ANTHROPOSOPHY, Vol. 2, No. 1, Easter 1927 

(Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1927), GA 60.

In the age of which I want first to speak, a civilisation flourished in the East that in my book “Occult Science” I have called the Ancient Persian civilisation. The teacher of mankind during the height of this civilisation was Zarathustra, Zoroaster. Not the Zarathustra of whom history tells; he lived later. The Zarathustra I mean is a much more ancient teacher of mankind. In those olden times it was, you know, quite a common custom for the pupils of a great and lofty teacher to continue for a long time to bear his name; and the Zarathustra we read of in history is in reality the last of a succession of pupils of the great Zarathustra. Now, this great teacher of mankind was initiated in a most wonderful and remarkable manner into the secrets of existence, and he could stand before the men of his time and teach them as an eminent and sublime initiate. Zarathustra knew — and it was his initiation that enabled him to have the knowledge — that in that place in the heavens whither our eyes are turned when we look at the Sun, lives a great and all-embracing Spirit. He did not at first see the physical Sun at all; in the place in the heavens where we today with our ordinary consciousness see the physical Sun, Zarathustra beheld a great and omnipresent cosmic Spirit. And this cosmic Spirit influenced him in a spiritual way, whereby he was able to know that with the sunshine, with the rays that fall from the Sun upon the Earth, come also spiritual rays, rays of divine-spiritual grace and bounty, which enkindle in the soul and spirit of man that ‘higher man’ to which the ordinary man in us must continually aspire.

...My dear friends, when the pupils of the old initiates looked out into the wide universe and spoke of what they saw living out there beyond the Earth in the workings of the Sun, yes, in the Sun itself, — when they spoke of the sublime Spirit-Being of the Sun as proclaimed by Zarathustra, they were speaking of the very same Being Whom, in these later times, we designate as Christ. So that we are adhering strictly to truth when we say that the initiates of olden times beheld the Christ outside the Earth in the Cosmos, in the Cosmos that has its centre and representative in the Sun. The real essence of the Mystery of Golgotha does not lie in the fact that it teaches of the Christ. The initiates of olden times also knew and taught of Him. Only, they spoke of Him not as living on the Earth, in the forces of the Earth, but as living within the forces of the Sun.

— Rudolf Steiner, PLANETARY SPHERES AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON 

MAN'S LIFE ON EARTH AND IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLDS 

(Rudolf Steiner Press, 1982), lecture 1, GA 211.

For more on Ahriman,

see "Ahriman".

For more on Christ the Sun God,

see "Sun God".

— Compilation by Roger Rawlings

[R.R.]