Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Faravahar — the winged emblem of Zoroastrianism, representing the fravashi or divine spirit within each person. Long before Moses received the Ten Commandments, long before the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree, long before Christ walked the shores of Galilee, a prophet arose on the windswept steppes of ancient Iran. His name was Zarathustra — known to the Greeks as Zoroaster — and the faith he proclaimed would shape the spiritual imagination of the entire Western world in ways that are only now becoming fully appreciated. Zoroastrianism is one of humanity's oldest living religions, and arguably the most consequential faith you have never fully studied. Its ideas about angels and demons, heaven and hell, a final judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil passed quietly into Judaism during the Babylonian exile — and from there into Christianity and Islam. The apocalyptic visions of Daniel and Revelation, the hierarchy of angels in ...

Fire — the most alive of the four classical elements, the one element that visibly consumes and transforms, that cannot exist without burning. Within its heart, the esoteric tradition placed beings of pure will and creative force: the salamanders. Of the four classical elements, fire is the most dramatic and the most dangerous. It transforms everything it touches, consuming the old to release energy for the new. It is the one element that cannot be held, that exists only in the act of burning, that always moves upward — a perpetual reaching toward the sky. Fire is the symbol of life itself: metabolism, body heat, the electrical activity of the brain, the nuclear fire at the heart of every star. And within fire, according to the Western esoteric tradition, dwell the salamanders — elemental beings of pure will and transforming power, the spirits of the flame that the ancients recognized as something more than chemistry. The salamander's story moves from the zoological curiosi...

Before Moses received the Ten Commandments. Before the Vedas were compiled. Before the Buddha sat beneath the Bodhi tree. Before Plato contemplated the Good. An Iranian prophet named Zarathustra — or Zoroaster , in the Greek rendering — proclaimed a vision of the cosmos that would change the history of Western religion forever. Zoroastrianism is the world's first great monotheistic religion, founded by Zarathustra in the Iranian plateau sometime between 1500 and 600 BCE (historians continue to debate the exact period). At its peak, it was the state religion of three Persian empires that ruled the ancient world from Greece to India. Today, it survives in two small communities: the Parsees of India (descendants of Zoroastrians who fled to India after the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century CE) and the Zartoshti of Iran who remained in their homeland. Despite this numerical smallness — fewer than 200,000 Zoroastrians remain in the world — the tradition's influence ...