CHAPΤER XXXVI
SECTS
Zoroastrianism split up into a number of sects. As indicated above, the Zoroastrian church had lost all control over its adherents. Sect after sect arose, each claiming to interpret the religion of Zoroaster in its own light.[1] The fact that numerous sects flourished in Iran at this period is proved by the frequent allusions to them by Greek, Arabian, Syriac, and Armenian writers. Shahrastani, as we shall see later, speaks of three sects, namely the Zarvanites, the Gayomarthians, and the Zardushtians. Mohsan Fani refers to fourteen sects as he witnessed ın his days in the seventeenth century. Several of these, he adds, flourished from early times. Unfortunately the account of those sects, which we find in the extant Zoroastrian literature, is very meagre. Several of them, about which we get some information from the non-Zoroastrian sources, are not even mentioned by name in the Iranian works. The Armenian writers, Eznik and Elisaeus, writing in the fifth century about the Zoroastrians of their own time, state they were split into two rival sects called Mog and Zendik. Damascius (529 AD), on the authority of Eudemus states that sects flourished in Iran which held space as the primordial being that created the rival spirits of good- ness and evil.[2] The most formidable of the sects, which counted eminent persons among its adherents during the Sasanian period and which had a considerable following long after the disap- pearance of this last Zoroastrian empire, was that of the Zarvanites. Zarvan, or Time, accompanied Mithra in his migra- tion to the far West and as Kronos was placed at the pinnacle of the divine hierarchy in the Mithraic cult.[3] Antiochus I of Commagene speaks of Boundless Time.
1 Jackson, Zoroastrian Studies, p. 174-177; Edwards, Sects (Zoroastrian) in ERE. II. 345-347.
2 De Primis Princ., tr by Chaignet, Les Premiers Principes, vol. 2, p. 129, Paris, 1898.
3 Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra, Eng. tr. McCormack, p. 107, Chicago, 1903.
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