Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Scientology, scripture, and sacred tradition
- 2 “He may be lying but what he says is true”: the sacred tradition of don Juan as reported by Carlos Castaneda, anthropologist, trickster, guru, allegorist
- 3 The invention of sacred tradition: Mormonism
- 4 Antisemitism, conspiracy culture, Christianity, and Islam: the history and contemporary religious significance of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
- 5 The invention of a counter-tradition: the case of the North American anti-cult movement
- 6 “Heavenly deception”? Sun Myung Moon and Divine Principle
- 7 “Forgery” in the New Testament
- 8 Three phases of inventing Rosicrucian tradition in the seventeenth century
- 9 A name for all and no one: Zoroaster as a figure of authorization and a screen of ascription
- 10 The peculiar sleep: receiving The Urantia Book
- 11 Ontology of the past and its materialization in Tibetan treasures
- 12 Pseudo-Dionysius: the mediation of sacred traditions
- 13 Spurious attribution in the Hebrew Bible
- 14 Inventing Paganisms: making nature
- Index
- References
9 - A name for all and no one: Zoroaster as a figure of authorization and a screen of ascription
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Notes on contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Scientology, scripture, and sacred tradition
- 2 “He may be lying but what he says is true”: the sacred tradition of don Juan as reported by Carlos Castaneda, anthropologist, trickster, guru, allegorist
- 3 The invention of sacred tradition: Mormonism
- 4 Antisemitism, conspiracy culture, Christianity, and Islam: the history and contemporary religious significance of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
- 5 The invention of a counter-tradition: the case of the North American anti-cult movement
- 6 “Heavenly deception”? Sun Myung Moon and Divine Principle
- 7 “Forgery” in the New Testament
- 8 Three phases of inventing Rosicrucian tradition in the seventeenth century
- 9 A name for all and no one: Zoroaster as a figure of authorization and a screen of ascription
- 10 The peculiar sleep: receiving The Urantia Book
- 11 Ontology of the past and its materialization in Tibetan treasures
- 12 Pseudo-Dionysius: the mediation of sacred traditions
- 13 Spurious attribution in the Hebrew Bible
- 14 Inventing Paganisms: making nature
- Index
- References
Summary
Commonly held to be one of the so-called founders of religion which make up “the foremost type of religious authority,” Zoroaster (= Zarathustra) belongs to the list of “sacred names” that stand “for a unique experience and … an uninterchangeable symbol of human faith and hope” – as Joachim Wach puts it in a classical study. As is the case with other “founders,” ancient and modern, the authority ascribed to Zoroaster is intimately linked to a textual corpus embodying what believers regard as divine revelation.
This chapter will contextualize the problem of textual ascriptions and the related inventions of sacred traditions with respect to two different yet interrelated historical lines of development. The first part will briefly discuss the problem of textual ascription with regard to the construction of Zoroastrianism as a chain of transmission (from the divine to the community of believers). Besides Zoroaster, two of his associates are relevant for this process. A spurious text is attributed to one of them in later Iranian Zoroastrian literature, while fragments have been ascribed to the other one outside the Zoroastrian tradition, that is, in the West, since the second century ce. In the course of the development of Zoroastrianism as a religious “system,” the foundational act of divine revelation came to be conceptualized as a verbal exchange (“dialogue”) in which Zoroaster is the colorless, shadowy receiver and transmitter of the divine “revelation discourse” spoken by the god Ahura Mazdā.
- Type
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- Information
- The Invention of Sacred Tradition , pp. 177 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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