Doug Metzger
speaker
2,647 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Doug Metzger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
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that is to say, most Sasanian kings, who ruled an empire four time zones wide, had more pressing things to worry about than enforcing religious orthodoxy.
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Manny, the prophet of Manichaeism, may have eventually bit the dust under the persecution of the zealous high priest Kirdir, but Manny also spent thirty years promoting a brand new religion with the benediction of the Sasanian king Shapur I.
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A few Sasanian kings are recorded as being more jingoistic Zoroastrians than others, while a few seem especially pluralistic in their outlooks, with the Sasanian Emperor Yazdegerd I marrying a Jew, and Hormuzd IV a Christian.
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Kings of kings, then, were more or less devout in their Zoroastrian beliefs, depending on their personal dispositions and the influences of those around them.
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Generally speaking then, the Persian Empire, like the Parthian Empire before it, was a Zoroastrian majority polity with numerous minority religions, in which official policy toward religion was overall tolerant enough to facilitate the flourishing of numerous large religious minority populations.
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It is a humbling fact to remember that in the Sasanian Empire's cosmopolitan centers, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Christians, and pagans of every stripe likely had a better understanding of the world's extant major religions than many of us do today.
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Okay.
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And while the Central Eurasian Empire was naturally a repository of many different religious ideologies, within the Sasanian Empire Zoroastrianism itself had numerous varieties depending on region and time frame.
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We call Zoroastrianism a monotheistic religion, and ultimately Ahura Mazda, later Ormazd, is in charge and his victory is a foregone conclusion.
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However, as in many religions with numerous divine beings, Zoroastrianism had other figures than Ormaz, who were revered by worshippers in different gradients over time.
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A female archangel named
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Anahida was one of these.
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Much more famously, Mir, also known as Mithra, an ancient Indo-Iranian deity, was worshipped so ardently at different junctures of Sasanian history that Mir worship became a sectarian movement tied to region, ethnicity, and noble pedigree.
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Various other sectarian movements within Zoroastrianism, movements called Zorvanism, and
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Mazdachism grew during Sasanian times, with different theological emphases on which Zoroastrian deities were highest of all and how devout believers might best conduct themselves.
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And one further element of Sasanian Zoroastrianism deserves our consideration for a moment.
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Just as Catholics safeguarded the Vulgate for centuries, many Zoroastrian clerics formed ranks around the Avesta, again the oldest and most revered set of Zoroastrian scriptures, not wanting the masses to read and misinterpret the religion's core texts.
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as a result, and as is the case in many religious cultures, the clergy and the commoners essentially practiced two different religions.
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The learned Megai or Zoroastrian priests recited the Avesta and drew their orthodoxy from the rarefied world of the religion's ancient scriptures.
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But ordinary folks took what they heard from their priests and revered angels that appealed to them, or sometimes made homespun, commonsensical connections about the religion that were out of step with the more labyrinthine reasoning of professional theologians.
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Showing 2561–2580 of 2,647 · page 129 of 133
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