Swords, Sorcery, and Socialism - Creation: Part 1

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

A crossover episode with Trevor from The History of Persia from a couple years ago. We discuss historicity, Zoroastrianism, and well, creation!patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

All right, I don't know how we want to introduce this because it's kind of both of our shows I Mean, it's yours is for you. So you mean you that's fair. All right Well, hello everyone. Welcome to a real weird episode of History of Persia because it's not really an episode of the History of Persia because it's not really an episode of the history of Persia. I'm here with Asha from the Sword, Sorcery and Socialism podcast. Hello. And we're going to talk about a book because that's what they do on the Sword, Sorcery and Socialism podcast. But we're also going to kind of talk about the history of Persia, sort of.

It's a book that's at least partially about the history of Persia, which I guess I talk about all the time. But this is a fiction book about the history of Persia. So that's what's making this special. Fiction book that off the bat, I want to give it some credit for in a lot of things trying pretty hard, but then weirdly not trying very hard at all. And some of the other things which we'll get into.

I mean, it's it's definitely trying hard. It's just not necessarily doing a good job. All right. So today we're talking about really one of my favorite like literature novels outside of your normal genre fiction that you guys normally do. Creation by Gore Vidal. All right, Asha, what are what are some first impressions here? Well, my first impression when you suggested this to me was that I didn't know Gore Vidal wrote historical fiction. I, you know, just know of him generally as like an American

vaguely political figure, you know, like that's where I knew his name from. So that was a surprise. But my generalized impressions of the book are he gives a lot of great detail, goes into a great amount of depth on a lot of the stuff that he wants to cover and is often very interesting and cerebral talking about sort of the main questions that he's trying to propose here within the story. Also can be a little long winded at times on anecdotes that aren't necessary. Little pet issues, I feel like that he just really wanted to talk about.

And as I'm sure we'll get into some of the historical accuracy is a little wiggly. And I'm not talking about the timeline stuff, the timeline stuff I can forgive is simply as a framing device for the story to happen the way he wants it to. You know, the figures living at the same time. That's cool, actually. Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's yeah. It's ironic that the biggest historical flaw in the entire book

is the existence of the main character. Yeah. But it does make the book better than if existence of the main character. But yeah, yeah. But it does make the book better than if he hadn't written it that way. So if it was just some guy, like if it was just a random Zoroastrian magin, you know, as he would call it, like it would work, but it wouldn't be nearly the same. I don't think. No, I there's one or two instances where I feel like having it be just some guy would have improved those chapters.

But for the overall story, like it kind of has to be Cyrus Batama. And we'll get into who the hell that is in a minute. A person who definitely was not real. Though a couple of things, just to get people on board who haven't listened to your podcast yet, because they should probably. One, when Asha is talking about how Gore Vidal goes off on long and unnecessary tangents, I just need everyone to know that her favorite author is J.R. Tolkien.

So take some of that critique with a grain of salt. No, that means I am familiar with long unnecessary tangents. long unnecessary tangents. Even though I will say before we recorded in my defense, my direct comparison for Vidal was Robert Jordan. That is true. In terms of, I think this is interesting, so I'm going to include it, whether it's story necessary or not.

But you're right, that's a fair critique, thank you. Well, as opposed to Tolkien, who was like, I'm going to guess I have to add some story to this if I want it published. There needs to be plot happening between these landscape descriptions. The other thing to note is that this is obviously not my normal format. And as a result of that, it's not going to be my normal speaking, lecturing,

whatever you want to call it style either. Uh, I'm not censoring this because I don't want to edit a bunch of bleeps into things and I don't want to self-censor myself while I'm talking. And I don't want to make Asha edit bleeps into things or self-censor while she's talking. So, I mean, I can, if you want, I can go back afterwards and put the one second pause after everything you say in this episode Oh, yes, that's you know, that's definitely what this conversation needs

But just me just my side of the conversation The other thing is sword sorcery and socialism You may not know from the title is a political podcast and since I'm stealing their format for this episode we're going to be political in this episode. If you don't like that stop. I don't think I've been particularly secretive about my own politics on the podcast or on social media. It's not front and center to how I talk about ancient history

But I shouted out to anarchist organizations a couple months ago. So pay attention And if you don't like that if you want to keep hearing me talk about Persia tune in next week And you know to be clear yeah my my podcast is political but it's not always you know, to be clear, yeah, my my podcast is political, but it's not always, you know, it's not lecturing politically. It's more, it's more me and my co-host, Cethel, looking at fiction stories and trying to examine the politics that the story is either telling you, the story is telling you either implicitly or like subliminally, whether it's the politics that the story is either telling you, the story is telling you either implicitly or like subliminally, whether it's the politics of the story or of the author and the author doesn't realize they're putting them into the story. And then there's creation, much like a lot of

those other books has a little bit of both, where the author is trying to tell you politics, but also sometimes is telling you them without knowing it because they just sort of bleed through into their writing. Right. And I think this is a good time to get into talking about Gore Vidal as a person. Because there's no way that guy wasn't going to let politics into his writing. He was a politician.

Yeah. he was a politician. So just from a writing perspective, Gore Vidal was utterly prolific for most of the second half of the 20th century. He was a novelist with tons of social commentary, mostly on American history and American politics, but he does have a couple of big prominent ancient history pieces, AKA creation and Julian,

which is about Julian the Apostate, the Roman emperor who tried to undo Christianity until he got stabbed by Parthians. Go us. Maybe wear a helmet, I don't know. Yeah no you can't otherwise how will they know that you're the living God Emperor or something. Not like Roman paganism was super intelligent for the Romans more than Christianity ever was. He was also possibly more famously a political essayist writing left-leaning to outright socialist articles for all sorts of major publications, mostly through the height of the Cold War, which you can imagine made him exactly as popular as left-leaning at the height of the Cold War sounds.

And he had a bunch of real public beef with Truman Capote. For some reason, of all people. Yeah, he had other public disputes with public figures for more obvious reasons, but I can't figure out why the hell he and Truman Capote had public beef with one another. Just that Capote sued Vidal over slander because Vidal said he got kicked out of that Capote got kicked out of the White House for being drunk. Yeah, they just he said a mean thing about him once.

And the two of them just decided to be enemies forever, I guess. Sure. Yeah, I don't get it. Eventually, Capote said that he's always sad about Gore. Very sad that he still has to breathe every day. Like you think there'd be more publicly easily available information about something like that. But now just two real famous literary figures at each other's throats. Much more understandable as his other public feuds with someone such as William

F. Buckley, who everyone should feud with, given the chance, I think. Yeah, I don't necessarily feel like feud is actually fair to that. You just shouldn't like William F. Buckley. And you really you shouldn't like people who call you slurs on TV. So yeah, well, yeah. Just don't mean don't like those people. But I mean, talk about people calling each other slurs. You also then have to be careful about Vidal himself. Well, right. Yeah.

So for the context here, Gour Vidal was out and proud bisexual in the 1960s Which you know is brave if nothing else on its face he was a vocal pro Cuba activist at the height of the embargo and a staunch anti Interventionist like military intervention up to and including World War Two. Like he thought the U.S. should not get involved in other countries politics, period. You can maybe make some moral judgments based on how strongly you feel about Nazis. But it's not like Vidal was 100% a great guy because he was publicly bisexual and extremely homophobic.

Just to a very strange degree, wildly homophobic. In a very strange way, even. Like, it's cool if you're bi, but if you're just gay, it's bad again somehow. Well, because I kind of feel like he was heterophobic too. Like that doesn't get the same press. But one of his friends, Jay Parini, described Gore as a bisexual evangelist. Like, okay, he thought everybody was bisexual. And if you were anything other than that, you were being self-repressed. I do want to say that the title Bisexual Evangelist does go pretty hard.

Like telling people they're repressing themselves for not being bi is bad. But the title Bisexual Evangelist is a good band name or a fun Twitter bio, I think. Are you going to steal that one? You know what? Don't worry about it. Let's talk more about it. Already there. Yeah, then there's, you know, guy is not without controversy because he is a or was and died in 2005. He was an anti sex work rape apologist He is a or was and died in 2005. He was an anti sex work rape apologist and pedophile apologist.

Yeah, he was specifically he was a big defender of Roman Polanski. Yeah. Oh, boy. If you need to know more about Roman Polanski, just Google it. I mean, you probably know if you don't look up Roman Polanski's rape case. There's a reason he hasn't been to the US in a very long time and never will again, more than likely. Yeah, I feel like I covered the important details with the things that Vidal was defending. Yeah. What you said, Vidal defended.

You have an idea of what was going on with Roman Polanski. So also weirdly Vidal a defender of Scientology sort of. Yeah, he's wasn't a big religion guy in general, which is kind of weird with the book that we're discussing, but also kind of not. Yeah, he was one signature on an open letter to the chancellor of Germany, alleging that Scientologists were being treated like the Jews were by the Nazis.

Hmm. Here's a clue. The Scientologists were allowed to openly operate without restriction. They just didn't get tax breaks. These to me are the same. You know. Like the Nazis. Yeah, I mean, clearly the the German Jews biggest complaints in the 40s was that they weren't receiving tax breaks.

Anyway, swiftly moving on. Oh, lots of jokes that I shouldn't make there. Yeah, I am excited to get back to what you said just there about him being not a religious person, which makes and doesn't make sense for this novel, for creation. And I'm like, I don't we'll get to that, I think, in the conversation. But that's an interesting thing I want to dive into, because I have some thoughts about that. Yeah. OK, so let's you know, let's lay out what creation is, I guess,

because that'll help us all make more sense. So creation is a book set in the fifth century BC, basically everywhere from Greece to China, which he calls Cathay because technically China wouldn't have been accurate at the time, but I don't know. I like, I don't know exactly what the political correct terminology debates

of the eighties were, but like Cathay would be seen as kind of insulting now. I don't know. In a parallel to you calling out my favorite author, it is clearly a choice of an antique and out of use word specifically chosen for its antique and out of useness, I think. Yeah. Much like Tolkien's choice of certain language, I think Vidal chose Cathay because it's no longer the accepted one and no longer in style and it makes it feel more, dare I say, exotic.

Yeah. And you know what? Who the hell am I to judge? I work and write in a field where we talk about Aryans and the Asiatics as a matter of course. And that's just like accepted terminology. And that comes up a lot in this book. Oh, yeah. Well, the Aryans thing in. Yes. In situ is fine.

Again, like your studies in the situation it's in, perfectly acceptable. It just feels weird occasionally through our modern eyes. Yeah. And listeners of my show will know I don't use that word when I can avoid it because it's weird and corrupted and I don't want to. So creation, fifth century BC, basically everywhere from Greece to China and the main character is Cyrus Spitama the grandson of the prophet Zoroaster who heard Zoroaster's dying words when he was murdered by

Tyrrhenian tribesmen. Tyrrhenian means people from north of Iran and because he heard what was interpreted as a Hora Mazda speaking through Zoroaster's mouth, Cyrus occupies this kind of unwilling religious role in society. And he's always been kind of dubious of any of the rituals associated with his religion, but also a staunch believer in Zoroastrianism. He has a very strained relationship to his own religion, is I think the best way to put it. And Cyrus is presented as an exact contemporary of King Xerxes, and grows up in the court of Darius the Great, becomes a lifelong friend of Xerxes,

but in between all of this, Cyrus goes on a whirlwind adventure, traveling to Anatolia, traveling to India, traveling to China and back again, and spending a whole bunch of time in the various iterations of the Persian court. And the whole book is told as his memoir narrated to his half Greek nephew, right? Yeah, I think it's his nephew. Democritus, while he is serving as the Persian ambassador to Athens under Artaxerxes I.

If I can make my first literary point here when you talk about the framing here, I actually really enjoyed the framing of this as the recall the memories of an old man to a young relation who is writing them down. That specific like sort of frame narrative, I think, adds a level of relatability to the story. It also allows him to present the story in such a way that it doesn't read nearly as dryly as it otherwise could, I think. Also, it allows the personality of the narrator to shine through more often And I just think that framing was an interesting choice, but a good one from Fidel.

It's absolutely one of my favorite parts of the book is the framing device. And I think that's one of the things that I really like about this book is that it's not just about the framing device. It's about the way that the book is framed. And I think that's one of the things that I really like about this book is that it's not just about that framing was an interesting choice, but a good one from Fidel. It's absolutely one of my favorite parts of the book is the framing device. I love once or twice every couple of chapters, there will be a break in the narration and he'll, Cyrus will make a comment and say, write that down, Democritus. Like it's, it's like, no, it's just a little bit of philosophical musing that wouldn't necessarily need to be

included in a narrative history or a memoir. But he's like, no, no, you write that down so that you have it written down somewhere. Or you'll there'll be points where implicitly Democritus was disagreeing with him about something. And he's like, he's like, Democritus disagrees. I think he's a fool. And then just like continues with the narrative. That is the really interesting thing is that Vidal really committed to Democritus as a scribe.

It's all Cyrus's dictation. And Democritus is almost never a character that we hear. He's entirely off stage. And we only ever see Cyrus's responses to him when we jump back to the framing device in 440s Athens. Mm hmm. At most, you get the narrator saying Democritus would like to know X and Y, you know, so it's like him reframing it for us, but you never actually hear democratists. But again, a very good interesting choice and a good one.

I think it makes the narrative flow much better than it otherwise could. And I guess the the main thrust and the reason that this is all relevant to Gourvidal's opinions on religion right now is that there's political motivations and purposes for everything that Cyrus is sent to do in all of his world traveling, but the thing that Cyrus is actually interested in over the course of the whole novel is interrogating the various philosophers of all of the different civilizations he comes across on What their opinion of the creation of the world or the universe is he said he said the title? He says the title a lot

The the title is also the main theme subtext is for cowards And I think Fidel fits this in in a really creative way by making that the one thing about Zoroaster's revelations that never quite sat well with anybody because you just keep jumping back a step until the religious figure you're talking to is like, God damn it. Fine. It just existed. Leave me alone. I mean, we philosophers and theologians throughout time have been dealing with this question in the Western tradition. You go back to, you know, Christian theologians talking about, you know, the immovable mover.

Or, you know what I mean? Like the one there, if if the universe was set in motion, it had to be set in motion by who? By God. Well, if God was already in motion, who set God in motion? And that's essentially the question that Cyrus Batana then puts to every philosopher or religious person that he can come across. And like you said, the fact that making that the shaky part of the Zoroastrian faith for Cyrus is a very good stand in for making it the, you know, for Gore Vidal's specific issue that he would like to investigate. Yeah, it's there's very much overlap in the author and the main characters primary motivations and

opinions about things Cyrus is Not a self-insert character, but he's borderline a self-insert character. It's pretty close Because I do think that he's written so that Cyrus comes to a different conclusion than Vidal himself. But I also think that's partially because he wrote a character who couldn't possibly end the book atheist. Like starting off as the grandson of Zohar Waster and your position in court being based on your religious and genetic lineage, you kind of at the end can't come out and just be like, eh, maybe there's no God. Well, and like, as far as even Cyrus himself is concerned, he had a legitimate divine revelation. Like.

He literally heard the voice of God speak to him. It's kind of hard to just decide, oh yeah, yeah, I'm atheist, even though God spoke to me personally. It's like any, any fantasy novel where like the gods empirically exist and interact with the world. And for some reason, the writers still try to include atheism in that setting. It's like, well, those people are just idiots because you can go outside and see, I don't know, your giant dragon god fighting a demon in the street. I've had this exact conversation with people around dungeons and dragons, specifically like

fifth edition. They're like, can you have an atheist character in D&D? It's like, well, you can, but it doesn't make any sense because you can, like you said, you can go out and look at them. They're right there. As long as they've never met a cleric. Like the most, in a situation like that, the most you can do is have somebody who, they wouldn't officially be atheist, but they could have the conclusion that the gods are not worthy of worship. That's a logical conclusion to come to. But the conclusion that they don't exist is empirically a silly one, because you can call them right there.

You mash up the right stuff in a bowl and they show up in person. Like what you want to do. I can summon a demon right now. You can't tell me they don't exist. But so you're right, Cyrus Spitama cannot like functionally come to an atheist conclusion within the story. He can't. But you can have him come to this kind of atheist, but not really conclusion.

Creation agnostic, like not agnostic about the world. He's still 100 percent sure that Ahura Mazda, Conclusion creation agnostic like not agnostic about the world. He's still 100 percent sure that a horror Mazda, who's only ever called the wise lord throughout the entire book. For some reason, he's very weird with what he bothers to translate. It doesn't even it isn't. Do I actually remember him ever actually using the using a horror Mazda? Or does he only in the like in the first couple chapters

and then it's just the wise lord? I don't guess that's him trying trying to be like this is the translation of what it is in Persian. Yeah, whatever. And that's that's a thing with a Vesta translations that it gets messy. And it's messy in this book too, because it creates a lot of confusion, which we'll get into in a minute. But, you know, he absolutely believes that a horror Mazda created the universe, that he is opposed by Araman. And he's just not sure about the exact nature of how those two came to be in the first place, which. Yeah, I'm sorry. We'll get into that because he just leaves out a number of interpretations of Mazda, you know, of Zoroastrianism that do answer that question

or answer it from a different way. And he just doesn't talk about those. Well, he does sort of, though, because, you know, sorry, I'm jumping ahead. Maybe I should disclose for for the listeners that I myself am Zoroastrian, a convert. Obviously, I am not, you know, born to a Zoroastrian family, but that is the religious faith that I follow. So I do have obviously my own opinions about this sort of thing, and partly why I was so interested to read this, to read this book, but we'll get into those. I think the one, if I can say the one more framing thing we need to get out of the way is something I mentioned at the beginning, which is a compressed time frame of other famous people.

Right. So and it's not even necessarily all that compressed for anybody other than the main character, which is the weird thing. Because if we were going to take a grandson of Zoroaster, mythical or not, as a main character. That would have been so long before the existence of Darius and Xerxes. I believe I've talked about this on the podcast before, but maybe I've just written about it like seven times on Reddit. At this point, those two blend together a little bit for me. There was a academically debated belief that Zoroaster lived as a contemporary to Cyrus the Great and that the Vshtaspa, who was Zoroaster's first royal convert and

patron, is the same Vshtaspa, who is better known as Histaspis, the father of Darius. Who is of course a character in this novel. And that's based on one Roman author and a much later Sassanid Zoroastrian tradition that I will talk about in detail some other time because it gets into like millenarianism and how they forget about most of the Achaemenids. But it's not actually super clear whether the Persians said,

oh, there was a guy named Histospes who lived around this time that must be our Histospes. Or if the Persians had already kind of melted their own timeline and the Romans read that the Persians put Zoroaster here and they're like, Oh, well, I know a Histospees from that time period, they must be the same dude. But that was a totally valid debate until basically the month after this book came out. after this book came out. Honestly, as a historical fiction novel about the Achaemenid period, it's just terrible timing because this book was published in 1981. And the Achaemenid history, or the Achaemenid studies workshops that kind of reset and gave a strong definition to the

discipline as a whole, started in 1982. Like the whole concept of studying the Achaemenids was reinvented immediately after this book came out. Yeah. They read this, they read this book and thought this can't be right. Yeah. There's a, there's a lot of details that are kind of staying with the safe interpretation of 1981 that by 1989 was completely out of date. And that's a, I think, kind of a big influence on the historical accuracy parts.

Yeah. So, so sure, he was working with a timeframe that at least was debated so we can have the grandson of Zoroaster in the court. That's, you know, that's to me, that's sort of like the one thing you have to put aside is, you know, your willing suspension of disbelief. The other thing with this sort of condensed time frame is that in his travels to answer his question about creation, Cyrus Pitama goes and meets with a lot of other famous figures who, again, I'm not an expert at all of them, so you'll maybe you've written it down to remind me of how close together all these people actually lived.

But throughout his life, Cyrus gets to obviously hang out with Darius, be BFFs with Xerxes, meet a young Socrates. Yeah, Socrates is more like a cameo. He's it's still in his young stonemason phase. So he's just like the guy patching up Cyrus's walls in Athens. He gets he gets a ride on a boat with an axe agoras. He meets the Buddha as in Satara Guttama. He meets Confucius.

He meets Lao Tse. Lao Tse, sorry. So how contemporary all these people were to each other? Do you remember? Yeah, the other big one is mavaraita from the Jain religion from India. And the Buddha and mavaraita are presented as contemporaries and basically every Indian source, or kind of more accurately, some of them are Buddhist sources that are only preserved in Chinese, but whatever. Sort of like Persian Persian information only preserved in Greek. Yeah, basically. Those two are contemporaries and they're both in the ballpark of the early Persian Empire.

You can kind of debate whether or not they were a little bit earlier than Cyrus the Great. Some of their stories make a lot more sense if they were earlier, because like they're hanging out in cities that really should be part of the Persian Empire. And there's no mention of it whatsoever. stuff in very like Northwestern India, right? Like almost in Afghanistan, but also no Indian history mentions basically anything west of the Indus River until the Mauryan Empire. So there's something weird happening there that we just can't understand because there aren't sources to help us understand it. So you can kind of wiggle them in wherever you want in a like 650 to 450 range. Confucius and Lao Tse are probably a little bit further apart, but one of them is probably contemporary with all these other people. One of them is probably a little bit

older, but neither is well documented enough to get a firm timestamp on it, but we're still looking at like within a century ballpark. And of course, like we know the Greeks because they put dates on everything. They're really positively obsessed with dating everything. So really, the odd one out here is that Zoroaster is alive because, you know, any modern study will say that he lived almost a thousand years earlier. Yeah, that's what we need to lay out. I mean, I forget we are, you know, this is your audience who will understand that, you know, Zoroaster was about a thousand years before the, you know, the Achaemenid

Empire as we know it would have actually been a thing. Yeah. So, but you know, like you said that it makes a better story to make it Cyrus and he at least kind of acknowledged like, it's not like he made Zoroaster the main character. Yeah, that would be a thing to be like biting off a little too much. You know what I mean? Like it makes your main character. Zoroaster himself would not get to like have doubts about creation. Yeah. Yeah. When Vohumana pops out of a lake and all but hands you a sword.

Yeah, actually, I'm not quite sure about this. Look who asked the Buddha. You just kind of, you go with what the divine being that's coming out of the water tells you at that point. This is the truth. And you're like, I believe you. point. This is the truth. And you're like, I believe you. The one thing I do have in our our doc here that I did kind of want to discuss is, is it weird that we've got Greek philosophers and the Buddha and Jainism and Confucius and Lao Tse and Zoroaster and Judaism's just not in there?

They even we even talk all we even talk about the Babylonian gods. We have to hear all about Anahita and Belmarduk and all these other Mesopotamian gods, but he never once mentions Jews. He mentions them one time and it's... Isn't it saying that Cyrus or Darius let them rebuild their temple? And it's Cyrus recalling that Zoroaster complained when, or no, that, uh, Histospes complained when Darius rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem. But he never speaks to any Jewish philosophers. He never speaks to any of them at all.

I mean, at least he interacts directly with the priests of the other Mesopotamian religions. Like you talked to, obviously they're dismissed pretty out of hand as, you know, Deva worshipers and nonsense. But he at least like they talk to the priests in Babylon. He never even, he never speaks to a rabbi at all. It's so weird to me because like, this is one of the most important periods of the Bible, like, they're inventing the

Torah. The other is being essentially codified or the beginnings of being codified at this time, you've got like, three minor prophets, fairly well-documented high priest, the last Davidic king before Jesus. And like he's in Babylon, like he leaves before Ezra, who's probably the big name in this period.

Like he goes to Greece, but Ezra lives in Babylon up to that point. Like, Ezra lives in Babylon. I'm saying Ezra is the biggest one because even Christians know who Ezra is. Ezra made it into the Christian Bible. Yeah, like as a standalone book, like he got the Christians actually carve off his book from Nehemiah to like emphasize to like, it's, it's very weird to me that especially Ezra because we go to Babylon a couple times, it just isn't in here. And I don't think it would be that it's too controversial because Vidal never seemed to

care about that. No, and I don't. I'm also inclined to believe that it's not some don't think it's like a, I'm not talking about them, you know, with big echoes around the name. I'm going to put this out there because I've just sort of thought of it. I was wondering if it's maybe that he just doesn't, in terms of he's writing about things, talking to these different philosophers, is it that he doesn't see the Jewish ones as having as big of an impact on stuff going forward into the future because the answers, maybe in his mind, the answers the

Jewish prophets would have given the same ones Christian ones would give, and that he assumes his readers will already be familiar with. So I think it's a little bit of that, because I do think that part of his goal here is to expose the audience to all of these different cosmogonies and all of these different creation stories. I also kind of wonder if he looked at it and decided that it was just too similar to Cyrus's existing viewpoint of we have one God

and that God's always existed and before that there was nothing and now there's a universe. Like because he really heavily defines Zoroastrianism as monotheistic Which we'll talk about as a choice Yeah, I think adding a second monotheistic section would have been where he was like, well, I don't have a way to not have Cyrus agree without offending people who I don't want to offend. Yeah, because Cyrus would basically have to be like, yes, we agree that there is a single God who is, you know, I know what the exact word, but ever existing who created the universe. But we just disagree about what that God wants or who exactly that God is. But we agree that the way it worked is the same.

Like you said, that would end up having you then have to come up with a different way for them to disagree about something. Yeah, I kind of think it would have it would work better now, 40 years later, where we have a slightly better understanding of the non-canonical or parabiblical books that kind of show the as a transition point where you could have that conversation and have them disagree about the source of evil or something like that. Sure. Like, but I don't think that was quite as well developed in the 80s as it is now. It's just, you know, that is the one major topic that just isn't in this book. It kind of feels like it stands out. And it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know,

it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, We're just not going to talk about this one major world religion that was also codifying itself right around this time in this area in the Persian Empire. Like he even specifically identifies

the temple of Yahweh in a list of diva temples. Like like if you had just left that one line out, it would stand out less. It drew attention to the fact that he's not talking about them. But anyway, let's we needed to call that out before we moved on. Yeah, I want to be clear. We're nitpicking. Also, this book is so long that it's that's true. We didn't need another section. I don't think I needed another chapter.

Then again, if he talked to Ezra in Babylon. That would have made the Babylon chapter way more interesting. You could have filled in some of some of the Babylon stuff with actual plot. Instead of just them going to the temple of Anahita to have sex more. I think it was Anahita, whatever. I mean, I think there's actually a line in the book where he says on a heater who is Ishtar, who is Kibble, who is Artemis, who is everywhere. The love goddess, the mother figure. Yeah.

Yeah. The the love and Warren fertility goddess who just kind of amalgamated over the entire fucking world. Look, people kind of into the same thing. Everyone agreed. They're like, there's got to be somebody for this. Like there's there's plenty of good, really historically accurate or historically accurate for 1981 stuff. You know, he does a great job of giving all four of the Persian capitals

are all kind of five of the Persian capitals or all kind of five of the Persian capitals their own unique vibe and description even and some of them like Iqbat and our total blank slates. I was gonna say, yeah, this part, I think we can diverge closer back to the typical stuff for your podcast talking about, you know, the actual historical details and stuff that he did really well, I think, for the Persian Empire. Like you said, like describing the capitals and really giving each of these locations a memorable flavor so you could tell them apart while you're reading. Yeah, and I think that's important because if you just look at like the ruins of Persepolis versus the ruins of Susa today.

They're the same fucking building. They're almost identical. The artwork is the same. The architecture is the same. They're both built on these giant plinths. And if I'm honest about it, the one quibble I have, he really doesn't seem to have understood what Susa was. I always try to portray the palace capitals as kind of standalone palaces in the middle of nothing surrounded by tents

and he opts to describe them as actual cities I do that because there's no evidence for there being any actual city but that's kind of a newer idea anyway. But like by doing that and giving Suza this kind of cosmopolitan Mesopotamian atmosphere, it stands out as separate from the political licentiousness of Babylon and the traditionalism of Persepolis and the foreignness really of Akh bad enough because it's not a Persian building. Oh, side note. So I listened. Is anyone was listening to my podcast knows I don't read actually. No, she can't. It's true. I'm actually illiterate. So I listened to the audiobook for this.

And there were a few pronunciations that struck me because they're different than the way you pronounce things. that struck me because they're different than the way you pronounce things. The holy city that starts with a P. How would you pronounce that? So I absolutely pronounce it wrong. Passargada? So I don't know why the audiobook narrator doesn't pronounce the E at the end. That's just weird. So you know what I'm talking about where he says calls it holy pass our God.

I always say Pesargadai but I started doing that before I had a lot of ancient Greek under my belt. And like if you actually look at the accent marks on the Greek word, it should be Pesargadai. Yeah, I don't know why he doesn't pronounce it with an I. That's just strange. actually look at the accent marks on the Greek word, it should be Pasaar Gada. Yeah. I don't know why he doesn't pronounce it with an I that's just straight. I just cause it pass our Gada and you're like, yeah. Yeah.

The other one, um, I see less of classicists being nitpicky about this one, but strictly speaking, it bad enough really should be a Kbatana. Um, but for whatever reason, people aren't as stingy about that. So it was a side. I just wanted to bring it up, because every time he said, holy pass our God, I was like, that's that doesn't sound right to me. The the author or the audiobook narrator, I think overcompensates in the other direction from what I end up doing.

Otherwise, though, narrator for the audiobook, really good. Really liked his voice. Very good. Very good audiobook. That's how I encountered it for the first time. Anyway, but yeah, and because it's fiction, he gets a chance to dive into all those little mysteries that I have to spend 35 minutes teasing out different versions of to explain

why we don't know the answer. And he can he just gets to skip to the part where he gives his own interpretation. Like he resolves I have like a whole 40 minute episode on the piece of Callius that some of my listeners complained about. He just resolves that by saying, oh, well it was a secret peace treaty, which I think is hysterical. Oh, we did the details in secret, ooh. Like there is a peace treaty and everybody like has to know there's a peace treaty because they stopped stabbing each other on a regular basis,

but nobody is allowed to officially say that it exists. We're not at war and everyone knows we're not, we have to pretend that we still are. I mean admittedly that lasts all of like 10 years before they're actually at war again. So who knows? Or you know like you can't talk about this period of Persian history without coming to some conclusion on Bardia, but he does it he handles it really well by making it like this kind of, ooh, do you not allow to talk about that?

Don't let anybody hear you saying that secret at court, like all the different off-brand interpretations. He sort of acknowledges that other interpretations of the story of Bardia exist by making them court rumors that you're not allowed to discuss. Until Cyrus, when he's an adult, finally gets to sit down with this aging, decrepit atassa. And she's like, Oh, yeah, Darius totally killed my brother. But throughout the early book, it's interesting, because you're looking at the frame narrative, the story that Bardia was impersonated by a Magian would make sense that that's the story that Darius would approve of and would be the official, you know, the air quotes official story, right?

Like that makes sense. Especially in the religious framing of the book. Yeah, where kind of inaccurately the doll makes the Persian Magians duplicitous and evil and devil worshipers. Like obviously, they're an easy scapegoat for a recent convert. Yeah. So in the world of the book, the story actually makes probably way more sense that it does in real life. In real life, having so much like a priest impersonated my brother or my cousin, you know, this this royal and then we had to kill him is way less plausible than in a world where like you've recently had

converts and you know secret pacts and stuff. Well, right and There is one thing that I thought was really funny when I was just relistening to some of the sections I'd booked marked this weekend where somebody I don't remember if it's Cyrus or one of the Greeks, says that Darius was Cyrus the Great's nephew. And I'm like, he didn't say he was his nephew. He claimed to be a fourth cousin. Like, and he was like, I have the best claim of anybody.

And I'm like, you're telling me there's not one additional son in four generations of this family In real life. It's such a much more tenuous claim Like even in the book where one character says that he's like a nephew They admit that one of the other six co-conspirators I think Gabrius is actually more closely related to Cyrus the great than he is then Darius is oh Yes, several like several of them just historically are like even if you just read Herodotus, I think it's Odinys, Cyrus's

father-in-law. Yeah, he's like, you have like his father-in-law, you have like his like first cousin, you've got like a number of actually more closely related people than your fourth cousin. Yeah, one of my favorite things to idly speculate about. Historically, we know Cyrus the Great had an uncle who should have been in line for the throne before Cyrus's family. Yeah. Like there's there we know there's other people. I mean, the book, the novel even gets into that a little bit when they're sort of discussing these things with the fact that like how weird it is for Darius to be on the throne and have a living father, like to have a dad that's alive and you're king.

They don't include this in the book, which I think is interesting. But historically, Darius the Great had his grandfather alive when he became king. Yeah, his grandpa was alive. He mentions in an inscription at Susa, "'When I became king, "'my grandfather, Arsimes, was still alive.'" It's gotta be weird to be like,

I am the third oldest man in my family. And we actually don't know if his how he relates to some of his brothers either. Like he could he could be like a second son and become king. Like there's not context. The second son of his stasps and his stasps is dead is also still alive. And you're like, what the fuck? Well, that's like he's not a clan leader. He's not an elder of any sort. He has no claim at all, which to me only reinforces the fact

that he definitely murdered the real Bardiya and the reason he's on the throne is because he's the leader of a coup. In which case you get to throw out the rules of succession because you took it by force, not through some like line of inheritance. Well, honestly, the fact that he's got two older male relatives alive at the time probably strengthens that position because the thing we see in all of the later coups in Persian history is the person who wins is the person who can get the most satraps on their side the fastest. Yeah. So if you've

already got your dad and your father-in-law and your grandpa, like you've already got three provinces under... And maybe an older brother? Yeah, like you get you get three or four provinces under your belt just with immediate family, like you're in a much stronger position, especially like Egypt doesn't really count yet. And he's in control of the army in the western half of the empire. So you kind of tick off all the boxes pretty quickly. You know, they've got most of the empire on lock, which makes it kind of ironic that they go to a small

town in media and the empire immediately falls apart anyway. Which is something that's not addressed in detail in creation because it's before the plot, but I feel like it could have made fertile ground for some conversations and drama, especially in Babylon. ["The Last Supper"] I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that.

I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and do that. We're back. We're back. And we were mostly just making fun of how Darius the Great came to power.

Yeah. I think if we wanted to finish off his sort of his his his Duracity, his whatever. You know what I mean? It's sticking to history. The one other thing we should talk about is how he handles Cambyses. Oh, yeah, that's real weird. So Vidal's explanation for. Cambyses is that he wasn't insane

in the way that Herodotus makes him insane. He was just really, really into his youngest sister. Youngest being very young. Who is not directly stated to be, but very much implied to be a child. So the explanation is he married a tossa while Cyrus was alive to test the waters on what people would think of an incestuous relationship so that he could then pursue his younger sister

when Cyrus wasn't around to force him to behave anymore. This second sister being the one that Tisias calls Roxane and who Cambyses abuses to death while he's on campaign in Egypt. Um, in most versions of the story, it's just a real weird thing to include. I like, I don't, it's, it's bad. Cambyses still ends up bad in the end and maybe worse than it, when he was just like lighting temples on fire. I feel like he included it just to make it Spicy Palace Gossip.

Yeah. I think also think it was partly as a story for character building for a Tossa. It's one of the stories that Cyrus Spitalma gets from his meetings with a Tossa. And so I think that or that's one of the first times you encounter what happened is him asking Atassa about it. And I honestly think that this story exists more or less

for us to learn more about who Atassa is than about what actually happened to Camp Bices. Absolutely. I mean, every time we see her, it's mostly to learn about how she's a political actor and not anything about what's actually being discussed on the page. It's just to flesh out her as a character in a way that can only really happen in that setting for reasons we'll get to. I think it's also a bit like what George R.R. Martin does with some of his Targaryen histories, where people keep trying to get the kids to not be incestuous, and then they're like, ah, but I live with her and my sister's real hot. And it, and like, nobody can control the royals.

I think it's trying to like, explain the incest in a way without bringing up any potential religious elements to it because Vidal was working off of a very particular conceptualization of Zoroastrianism. And since this is like the 17th time we've brought that up, it's probably time to talk about it. Yeah, yeah. The thing about annoyingly, to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. The.

The thing about annoyingly, I feel like if you're like just a casual, like an average person that is glancingly aware of Zoroastrianism and like the Persian royal family, I feel like that's one of the things you've probably know, right? Or you think, you know, is the like Persian royal family incest. Yeah, I shortly before the one where I'm going to talk about on a heat in a week or a couple of weeks or a month or two. I have a big long ex.

I don't know, tangent scripted into one of my episodes to explain what the hell that is because it's strangely the most logical assessment of divine sexuality and the most uncomfortable that I've ever had to read. the most uncomfortable that I've ever had to read. Yeah, it is in a way the particular subset of medieval Zoroastrians way to explain the age old question of,

oh wait, weren't all the gods siblings? Yeah. And weren't all of Adam and Eve's kids siblings? To which these handful of writers in Iran in 1000 AD said yes, and that was good. Other religions have other takes on it. The Christians simply don't mention it ever again. Yeah, Christianity just kind of like looks down at its feet and rings its hands until you stop looking. Yeah, Christianity does this fun thing with Adam and Eve and then Cain and Abel, question mark question mark humanity.

Hey, they have a third brother. Question mark question mark humanity. And then you have the flood where it happens again. Question mark question humanity. At least with the flood, it's specified that it was all of Noah's sons and their wives. Everyone whose cousins cool. Yeah, Christianity just sort of pretends. Yeah, like just sort of doesn't answer until you give up looking.

I don't know how Islam handles the same question. So I'm not as familiar with that. Like you said, a lot of religions, the Greeks just sort of were like, they're the gods. What can you do? I mean, the Greeks explanation is like they're gods. They're not the same as us. And their explanation for where all the people came from was explanation is like, their gods, they're not the same as us. And their explanation for where all the people came from was,

Prometheus gave us a normal sized gene pool at the start. And that's just what it was like. He made us out of clay, and there were enough of us that it was fine. Whereas the gods, yeah, the rules, the human rules don't apply to, you know, divinity. Yeah, the Zoroastrians, like you said, in the medieval times went back and were like, yeah, everyone is siblings and that's cool. Which I feel like a lot of the, this might be a slight tangent, but a lot of, I guess,

the little things that even the casual observer might know about Zoroastrianism is stuff that probably wasn't even actually codified until the Sasanian period anyway, and probably would have been handled differently during the... Later for a lot of it. Yeah, and later, whereas this period that we're talking about with creation, which is the Achaemenid period, would have been pretty wildly different with exactly what they were doing and how they handled that sort of thing. We're dealing with like post hoc rationalization for things much, much later. Yeah. I like, I see the guy who conquered Egypt.

It's 100% plausible that he was like, well, if I'm going to be a pharaoh, I got to do as the pharaohs do. And like that was the extent of it. We know that right around that time, they also borrowed the Egyptian calendar. So, you know, it might just have been a cultural osmosis thing. Which we know the Persians were actually like the opposite of like culturally dominating. When they invaded places, they didn't go and Persianize everything the way like later conquerors or other conquerors would do to regions they conquered. And it seems to be they were a bit more like, well, where are we now?

Oh, this is what people do here. Well, we'll do that while we're here. You know what I mean? That's yeah, that's very much a like not even a Hellenistic thing because most of the Hellenistic rulers kind of they stay more Greek than the Persian state Persian, but the early ones just kind of go with wherever they wound up. You know, like the Seleucids are vaguely Persian, Mesopotamian.

The Ptolemies just become Pharaoh straight up. It's only later that you get these guys who are like Greek chauvinists. No, you know who it is? It's the goddamn Romans. It's always goddamn Romans. It's always the Romans' fault. I eventually we're gonna get to the Maccabees and we're gonna see where the Bible got all those ideas that there were these kings in the Middle East who kept trying to make them bow down and worship them as gods and his name's Antiochus.

All I'm saying is that our modern conception of an empire that goes somewhere conquers it and then forces the people there to live as they do. Our first real huge documented example of that is the Romans. So like a lot of empires before that were a bit more sort of culturally malleable than we imagine they all are now as you know, living in a world post-colonialization. So yeah I mean I'd even argue that like the Romans only sort of did that. Yeah because the Achaemenids Persianized

areas that didn't have administrative infrastructure like the region around Armenia and Cappadocia really heavily Iranianized under the Achaemenids. Because there wasn't any state infrastructure to speak of, so they had to just kind of import it. And they got to import the one that they used, which is really kind of what the Romans did. You know, they left the Eastern Roman Empire mostly unattended and just kind of let them stay Greek. And there just wasn't, you know, there weren't people in Gaul after Caesar. But like there also wasn't a state infrastructure there beforehand either. So, of course, the one that was put in place was Roman. What else was it going to be? There wasn't an alternative.

I think a lot of our vision of empire is British. If we're really honest about it, it's what the British did to India. But also even under the guise of the empire comes in when there's no state structure left. The Romans were also really big on, you know, the making a desert and calling it peace. And so it's real easy to import the Roman structure to a place that you completely destroyed. So yeah, if you do a genocide with swords,

you're very scary people. Anyway, focusing it back on our story, I do think that also does explain why Zoroastrianism spread more in modern day Azerbaijan and Armenia than it did in other areas of the Persian Empire, because those are areas that did not have sort of state level structures as strongly as other places in the Persian Empire. You know, the Mesopotamians and the Greeks and the Egyptians already had strong religious pantheons and structures, you know, whereas if you're talking, you know, the caucuses, they they're sort of religious institutions weren't as strong or codified. So it would be easier for Zoroastrianism to make inroads that way. Well, right. And there's just more evidence for Iranian settlement and Iranian building projects.

And when they, you know, if they weren't just borrowing the existing palaces and temples, well, they were going to build their own and they were going to build them for the gods they liked. And, you know, if someday I'll talk about this in detail, but by the Sassanid period, there was a debate about whether or not Armenians counted as Iran, like they were so heavily influenced. I mean, there's a whole thing about how in the Sasanian period you've talked about this, how the idea of like the regions listed in the Avesta, the actual like sort of origin point, you know, moved from being somewhere in, you know, Afghanistan to over in Azerbaijan.

Yeah, they renamed Azerbaijan to be the homeland of Zoroaster. Like it was really heavily influenced. What part what do you want to focus on next in this story of creation? We want to go into him meeting the other religions. Or do we want to talk about his concepts of Zoroastrianism first? I think just we're already kind of there and we're not going to be able to stop coming back to it. So we need to explain how the doll presents Zoroastrianism because it's not how I present it. So we need to explain how Vidal presents Zoroastrianism because it's not how I present it. And there's a reason for that.

And that reason is colonialism. So I have made a point to stress in my podcast that a Kaminid religion, whether you wanna call that Zoroastrianism or say that it didn't have enough rules to be Zoroastrianism yet, which I think is a dumb argument, was polytheistic. Like there's not really a better way to describe it. I'll keep using the word divinities when I'm talking about gods who aren't a Horomazda to play nice with as many people as possible. with as many people as possible. But they're, they're divine, but they're not God, yada, yada. Yeah, you've got Mesopotamian gods having their ceremonies carried out by the Magi. And you've got Elamite priests who are in charge of Ahura Mazda. And the most popular God in Persia was Humban, who is not Zoroastrian. You just can't really get out of it. And you've got all like, I keep coming back

to the Yashacht and everybody loves them Because they're cool. Yeah that they worshiped other beings like that's just all there is to it But vidal frames Zoroastrianism as 100% monotheistic or You could kind of say dualistic because he still got our Iman But in this context our Iman is very much on the same level as Christian Satan. So it's whatever you, you know, whatever you want to call Christians

who have a real thing for the devil. Catholics. I'm sorry. No, they have way more gods than Vidal was attributing to Zoroastrianism. As an aside, I did kind of want to bring that up, that like, if we're trying to make corollaries here, there are some people that would make the correlation between sort of your classic Zoroastrianism as being sort of like Catholicism in that you have God, but you also have a bunch of other divine figures that sort of have purviews over things that you could pray to for up for specific reasons.

The way Catholics pray to various saints or whatever. Now, is that a perfect corollary? Obviously not. But it's an illusion that a lot of our listeners may be somewhat more familiar with. Yeah, it's imagine if instead of saints, Catholicism gave all of those roles to angels and you'd kind of be on the mark for this particular interpretation of Zoroastrianism, which is still more polytheistic than what Vidal is going for. Because the way he presents it, all of the yasadas are demons who are

seeping in at the end of Cyrus Potama's life and corrupting the religion and because they're being accepted, which is just not true. That's a really strictly monotheistic view of it that's not just not accurate to the Gathas. Like if you just take the text that is Zoroaster's words or maybe the words of his immediate friends, there's still other divinities. One, you've got the six Amesha Spentas, who are all called out by name in the Gathas. How separate they are from Ahura Mazda is

still not clear in Zoroastrianism and you can take two given texts about them from any period of Zoroastrian history and you'll get two different answers. But there's also just a blanket Ahuras and other good spirits that get mentioned. They're not called out by name because that's not what the Gothas are for, but they're referenced. So it's very clearly saying like, there are other beings that are worthy of worship. And Vidal takes this hardline stance that no,

it's just a Horomazda and he is opposed by Araman and everything else is a diva that needs to be expunged or was expunged by Zoroastrian is creeping in because they couldn't convince everybody fast enough. And part of that is a consequence of crunching the timeline down, but because you need to be able to have Anahita and Mithra and everybody in the came new period because they're well documented. Let's say it's a very American Protestant version of Zoroastrianism to me.

I've just turned Mazda Yazna into evangelical Christianity. Well, here's the thing. You're not that far off. It's actually a very Scottish Protestant interpretation of Mazda Yazna. And I don't want to go down the entire rabbit hole here for two reasons. One, it would take like four hours and two, I want to have you or maybe Brendan or Roberto on to steal behind the bastards format to talk about this a little bit more. there was this Scottish Presbyterian minister, or maybe Anglican minister, Protestant minister, who went to India in the late 1700s and just was horrified because he was a Scottish Protestant

and landed in the middle of what was essentially, from his point of view, an ancient pagan society. Like, you know, you've got temples to gods, you've got a god of thunder and a god of death and a god of love and a god of war. It was all of the things that the Bible very explicitly says are the worst, but he can't attack the Hindus because there's a billion of them.

So he picks on the Parsi Zoroastrians and just hammers this community and becomes kind of the ringleader of this group of missionaries just picking away at this community in Gujarat. This community who we need to be clear is very small and are still like not that many generations removed from just being refugees. Well, and like, you know, we're what a hundred, 150 years removed from the Mughal Empire, like being a Muslim empire that ruled over India, like Zoroastrianism doesn't have a great history with Islamic rule, which is why there's only 150,000 Aura-Astrians.

There's like five of us. So he's like, he's deliberately targeting this largely illiterate minority community and dismissing them when they can't debate him on European theological terms. So they can't go get their holy book, which doesn't really even exist at the time. Like there's all of the Avestan scripture, but there's not an single Avesta, because it's just a bunch of different things that are written in the same language. And those are the important ones, but they're not all one thing. Nobody, you know, they don't have a fully

codified Bible. You know, it's not even really a fully codified Bible equivalent now. It's just people have put in the effort to gather all of them in one place. But they mostly only know Gujarati. They mostly don't have the scripture committed to memory because it's arcane and impossible to understand without a lifetime of practice. So they resort to the things they know, which are things like the Shahnama and other medieval epic poetry that is about Zoroastrian history and has cultural and historical and religious value to Zoroastrian communities, but it's not their scripture. So to these ministers, it doesn't count. Well, in walks after about 40 years of this crap, a nice German professor who came to study Sanskrit and happened to bump into some Parsis and be really

interested in what they had going on. And he wasn't a dick. So the local Mobeds and Dastors, who are the highest ranking of modern Zoroastrian priests, let him come and observe the Yasna, the Zoroastrian regular liturgy. And this guy made friends with a priest who was probably the most educated or most well versed Zoroastrian religious leader of the last hundred years. A guy named Dastor Meher Jirani, who had basically not just the Avesta, but all of the Zend, the supplementary commentaries,

the Cessanid era literature committed to memory. if not word for word, then message for message. And this priest and this German professor kind of worked out what became the Zoroastrian Reform Movement, which reinterpreted their own scripture as, oh, all of this other stuff is later linguistically, which means we can throw it out and just say, we just use the Gathas and it's a monotheistic message, which became a legitimate minority movement in the already very minority community in the late 19th century. And that was the one that was really popular for Europeans to hear about because it was the one that sounded like them. Yeah, it's the most Euro familiar. And that's not the reform movement that took off in Iran and India, which was a slightly

different reform movement that incorporated all of this European academic study to kind of create a system of priority and recognize some of the flaws in the language of stuff like the Vendadad, which is the law code that says beat people a thousand times for every crime they commit, but didn't throw out all the traditions. I like to call the Vendidad the Zoroastrian Deuteronomy, where it's like, here's all the laws and their stupid, stupid punishments. We should keep some of them though. Like we should definitely keep the fact that if you kill an otter, we're going to beat you to death with sticks or whatever it was. Yeah, take the whole section about dogs and just put that into actual law. Yeah, that's fine.

And the rest of it can probably go. It does contain some of the stuff that is what makes Zoroastrian philosophy so engaging to me in that it's incredibly logically consistent most of the time. Yes. But you don't need to whip somebody a thousand time because they didn't bury their toenails in the right place. So you've got this interpretation that gets that gets really widespread in the period of time when Zoroastrian scriptures being translated into English and German that tells Europeans that Zoroastrians were originally

a perfectly monotheist, just like Christian people, and was corrupted over time. And that's the version that Vidal is using, but it's not the version that anybody actually adopted in practice. There is a reform movement that de-emphasizes some of the later material, but it also keeps the ysadas and it keeps the holidays and it keeps the ceremonies. I, I'd also like to make the point that the making a Zoroastrianism sort of in the Christian image of this perfect monotheism also works as a good European storytelling technique as for the Zoroastrians to be the victims

of the Muslim conquest, you know, because it sets them up as this perfect monotheism that actually isn't that different from Christianity really when you think about it, who were also destroyed by the evil Muslims, you know what I mean? Like it gives Christians something that they wanted to hear anyway, I think. Yeah. From Vidal's point of making it that and then, you know, you don't get any of the intermittent thousand years of history in between those two events. Absolutely. And I think it also it really parallels the portrayal of

Judaism's development in the Bible where God shows up to Moses and says you will worship me now and if you don't I will make you wander in the desert and then every three pages for the next one Old Testament the Hebrews keep slipping into idolatry and cavorting with the neighboring peoples and worshiping other gods. And that's exactly what Vidal is describing in Zoroastrianism in creation. But that has the side effect of making the Zoroastrian version of Ezra, who recodifies it and brings it back to monotheism, a German professor. Like, it almost inadvertently creates a white savior narrative.

Which is, as we say in the business, not cool. It's a scientific term. Yeah, not cool people. And there's a lot. Like I said, I could talk about the nitty details of how this stuff developed for two hours by itself. But yeah, the perfect pure monotheistic interpretation of Zoroastrianism is very much a colonial invention, which is to the detriment of this book because actual Zoroastrianism explains creation a

lot better than Cyrus Sputama does. Yeah, we're now finally getting to what is sort of his purpose of this book, which is to explore the idea of creation. And Cyrus Potama, our main character, who is supposedly the mouthpiece of Zoroastrian thought, doesn't even have the level of explanation or detail that Zoroastrianism had at the time. Okay, and this is actually where I decided to cut for the two-parter. We did not originally record it with a natural endpoint in the middle, but I don't really love uploading three-hour audio files to History of Persia if I can help it.

So you can join us next week for some further discussion of religion as presented in Creation. Until then!