The second part of Dr. Hara’s series on angels traces how Zoroastrian dualism handed the cosmos its central plot – good versus evil.
In the previous essay, we traced the lineage of the guardian spirit from Sumerian temple guardian to Assyrian colossal. Yet that narrative remains fundamentally incomplete. It accounts for the form of the angel – the wings, the anthropomorphic hybrid – but not the moral architecture within which angels would come to function. The guardian shedu and lamassu were powerful, certainly, but they were not combatants in a metaphysical war. That transformation came from elsewhere, from the high plateaus of Persia, where a prophet named Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) conceived of a universe fundamentally divided against itself.
Zoroastrianism is not well remembered in the West, yet its theological influence on the three great monotheistic religions cannot be overstated. It arrived at a particular historical moment – after the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great had conquered Babylon and encountered the Jewish population in exile. The intellectual and religious exchange that followed was of profound mutual influence instead of domination. The Persians, whose empire was vastly more cosmopolitan than any that had preceded it, permitted their subject peoples to maintain their own religious practices. This tolerance, paradoxically, created the conditions for unprecedented theological synthesis.
The innovation of Zoroastrianism was radical. It posited the universe as a cosmic battlefield. Ahura Mazda, the supreme god or ‘Wise Lord’ was opposed by Ahriman, the destructive principle, the spirit of negation and death. This was not a universe governed by a single capricious deity whose moods shifted like the Tigris in flood season. Rather, it was one in which good and evil were locked in eternal struggle, each possessing real power, each commanding armies of spiritual beings. The mortal, in this cosmology, was not merely a victim of supernatural whim but a participant in this cosmic conflict, called to choose a side.
Ahura Mazda was served by the Amesha Spentas – the ‘Holy Immortals’, divine beings of tremendous power and distinct personality. They were agents and warriors of the divine realm, each presiding over an aspect of creation. Unlike the earlier Mesopotamian uttuku, which were often local and specific, these beings had a universal scope. They represented a systematized angelology almost like a hierarchy or a division of labor. When Judaic theologians, centuries later, would develop their own angelology in response to Persian influence, they would adopt this model. The archangel Michael, commanding God’s heavenly armies against Satan and his demons, carries the direct imprint of the Amesha Spentas and their conflict with the servants of Ahriman.
Yet the mirror image – the demonic principle – is equally important. Ahriman and his demonic hosts represented rebellion and the principle of entropy opposing the order established by the divine. This was a theology of stakes. The universe was not governed by arbitrary gods but human choice mattered because the outcome was genuinely uncertain.
What kind of an Ironist are You?
The artistic record preserves this shift with striking clarity. Consider the relief of Ahura Mazda from Persepolis, carved in the fifth century BC. The god is depicted in a pose of protective vigilance, sometimes shown protecting the sacred fire. The image radiates an intensity absent from earlier Near Eastern royal iconography. This is a god who acts, protects, and defends. The winged symbol of Ahura Mazda became one of the most enduring emblems in all of religious art, adopted and adapted by cultures from the Mediterranean to South Asia.
Against this light stood unmistakable darkness. The Assyrian demon Pazazu, carved in bronze statuettes that survive from the seventh century BC, is grotesque, demonic, winged but undeniably monstrous. Where the lamassu’s wings lifted and transcended, Pazazu’s wings suggested a violent, predatory speed. He was the demon of plague and disease, of the wind that carries contagion, the supernatural adversary that brought suffering. Pazazu was a chaotic intelligible evil.
The Sumerian goddess Lilith, whose image appears in reliefs dating to the eighteenth century BC, occupied a similar space. Originally a household spirit or demon, she gradually became associated with death and the night, a figure both feared and invoked. The evolution of her image reflects the Persian conceptual revolution. Once she was merely a local hazard, now she was death itself, opposing the forces of fertility and life.
Perhaps the most eloquent surviving artifact of Zoroastrian dualism is the silver plaque from Luristan, dated to the eighth century BC, depicting the birth of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. The composition captures the theological essence – two cosmic principles emerging simultaneously, neither superior to the other in origin, each possessing inherent reality and power. This was not a world in which evil was merely the absence of good – the later Christian formulation – but rather a world in which evil was a presence, a force, an active principle requiring constant vigilance and resistance.
The legacy of this vision cannot be contained within ancient history. When Jewish theologians, working in the Persian diaspora or under Persian imperial rule, began to systematize their own angelology, they borrowed the Persian framework. Michael as commander of God’s forces, Satan as the cosmic rebel, heaven and hell as opposed realms of spirit. The Christian tradition, inheriting Jewish theology and hellenizing it further, would elaborate this dualism into elaborate angelic hierarchies and demonic orders. Even Islam, arriving later into a region already saturated with these concepts, would incorporate Quranic angels and djinn into a universe fundamentally shaped by the Persian insight- that the cosmos is a stage whereupon good and evil wage an unending war.
We inherit this vision still. When we speak of angels and demons, when we imagine a universe divided between light and darkness, we are participating in a conversation that began on the Persian high plateaus, crystallized in relief carvings and temple inscriptions, and has echoed through three millennia of Western and Near Eastern religious thought. To understand angels is to understand how the great faiths came to imagine morality and cosmic justice. The history of the angel is the history of how humanity came to see itself as a participant in the deepest struggles of existence.
The next piece will be about how these ancient guardians and cosmic warriors transformed as they encountered Greek philosophy, Jewish mysticism, and Christian theology.
–
Contributed by
Dr. Hara Papatheodorou
