Moreover...

Moreover, the materials chronologically placed between these two dates are sometimes typologically so incongruous that it is very easy to abstract from them a certain type of religion and attribute it to the founder, making of him, e.g., either on idealistic philosopher or a shaman, and then explain the development of Mazdaism that followed either as the decay or a repaganization of a highly philosophical religion, or as a successive theologization of originally mystical perceptions.

It would be no exaggeration to say that the only comprehensive approach to the enormous and extremely varied religio‑philosophical materials contained in the corpus of Mazdaic texts is to consider them synchronistically as a whole.

Though one may not agree with many details of Professor Corbin's theories, one cannot but agree with him when he writes: “A spiritual morphology that attempts a reconstruction and revaluation of the actually living devotion impels us to consider the canonical Avesta, or at least what we possess of it, its ritual, as preserving at its centre the Psalms (Gathas) of Zarathustra and the middle‑Iranic (Pahlavi) and Parsi translations and commentaries as a whole.

Also in this case, it seems that when the believer recites his Bible or when the Liturgy is celebrated, all objections taking historical stratification as a pretext fail to reach their aim. If we always ask: `Whence does it come?' we practically do nothing more than wander here and there, formulating hypotheses vainly following one another.

We should rather ask: `At what does it aim?' Then the soul would answer, accounting for what has been its purpose.”[^1] We shall, therefore, make as the basis of the present chapter the latest form of pre‑Islamic Iranian religiosity, the form represented by the whole corpus of the Avestic and Pahlavi Scriptures possessed and venerated by the Parsecs (not in the sense, of course, that we shall follow necessarily their interpretation of them).

For it is safer for a philosopher to interpret an actual and concrete corpus of religious scriptures, than to interpret the ever‑changing reinter­pretation of them made by the historians. It will be useful, however, to reproduce, as an introduction; the most widely accepted diachronical explanation of the numerous so‑called “contradictions” of the present Mazdaic corpus, even though it does not seem to be completely satisfactory.