Good Deeds -- The Story of Zoroaster

Historians of religion tell us that the ancient Persian Zoroaster, and not Moses or Jesus or Muhammed, actually fathered the Western monotheistic tradition. To refresh your memory: Zoroaster of “Good words, good thoughts, good deeds” fame was the first prophet to insist that there is only one true God, Ahura-Mazda, and that he is opposed by a powerful super-devil, Ahriman, and that the two will wage war until the end of the world (the “endtime”), when Ahura-Mazda will subdue Ahriman after a mighty struggle and thereafter usher in a paradise beyond imagining for those who successfully pass through the Last Judgment and are not, like their less fortunate brethren, hurled into Hell. So: Zoroaster invented monotheism, Satan,apocalypse, the Last Judgment, heaven and hell-ideas shamelessly purloined by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Every religious scholar worth his salt believes that Zoroaster has been short-changed in the credit department, and most believe that he should sue the idea-thieves “until their teeth bleed.” The idea-thieves, in this case, being the Big Three and of course Mazda.

Unfortunately, the anger of the scholars has long been misplaced, as revealed by a clay tablet recently discovered under the bed of Caesar Borgia. The tablet’s cuneiform markings-deciphered by Borgia himself- introduce us to an altogether different Zoroaster, one who turns the conventional history on its head. First, “Good words, good thoughts, good deeds” had nothing whatever to do with morality or religion; rather, this was Zoroaster’s advice to those purchasing real estate: if you have “good words” for the sellers and maintain a positive attitude (“good thoughts”), you will end up with the “good deeds” to many hot properties. Second, Zoroaster by no means invented the idea of apocalypse as we know it; rather, he was referring to a new Persian dance he was promoting called the apocalypso. Third, far from suing Mazda for stealing the name of his one God, Zoroaster actually admired the automaker and was quoted as calling the Model 666 “a devil of a car.” Fourth, the notion of “the mark of Satan,” thought to reveal that a person had sold his or her soul to the devil, was a corruption of Zoroaster’s famous “mark of Zoro,” a weird birthmark invented by Hollywood descendant Sam Goldwyn. Fifth and perhaps most surprising, Zoroaster was not in fact Zoroaster: he was Zoro Gilgamesh. An entrepreneur renowned equally as a slick businessman and for his utter failure with the ladies, Zoro was such a strike-out artist that very early on, while ardently pursuing teen queen Hilda Sedno, the very tachycardia of his desire, he earned the nickname Zoroaster from his Parsi pals in the business community, who had a running joke that “Whenever Zoroaster, Hilda Sedno.”

© 2002