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.
Appearances
In Sasanian Zoroastrianism, there was frock religion and folk religion, and the two didn't
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ever line up very squarely.
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To sum up, just as the Sasanian Empire was not especially unified during the Rashadun invasion, Sasanian religion during the 600s was made up of a lot of different pieces.
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The Bundeshion occasionally seems like it's in search of lost time, but the lost time that it mourns was an epoch of religious pluralism as much as it was an epic of Sasanian religion.
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Just unity.
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So let's draw some general conclusions.
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When we read the Bundehijan, there is a keen sense in the text that a period of unified piety is giving way to apostasy.
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With the book's gloomy remarks about time, the Bundahijan is a piercing reminder that Zoroastrians in and around modern-day Iran during Islam's first two centuries.
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were absolutely devastated to find themselves a colonized underclass.
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At the same time though, the Bundeshijan marks a resurgence.
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The Persian Samanid dynasty ruled the old Sasanian Far East of Khorasan from 819 to 999, and in it, Sunnis, Shias, and Zoroastrians were all part of a greater movement called the Shubiyya, generally a cultural pushback against.
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Arabization.
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This pushback was not a rejection of Islam, but instead a reassertion of Persian cultural identity within the new Islamic world, including the traditional Sasanian social order and religious landscape.
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The traditional Sasanian social order and religious landscape, as we just learned, was a thing built from many parts.
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The Persian Empire had been the nucleus of Eurasia for more than a thousand years, and though occasional emperors sought advantageous partnerships with the Zoroastrian clergy and attempted to impose orthodoxy on the populace, Persia was
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Too vast, and Zoroastrianism itself was too rich and manifold for a monarchical dynasty to control.
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As a result, Sasanian Persia was a religiously diverse empire whose majority faith was itself diverse, a religion with regional variants, in which lavishly educated clerics often weren't on the same wavelength as their parishioners.
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Long as it was, it worked.
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The Bundahishan's nostalgia for the old days of Zoroastrian hegemony is a eulogy for a more Persian Persia.
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And as we begin the literature of the Islamic Golden Age in the next few programs,
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Showing 2581–2600 of 2,647 · page 130 of 133
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