Flow, Reform, Flow Reform, Stone
The Historical Pattern of Religious and Cultural Change.
We live in a period of great change where none of the old certainties about life, the Universe and our place in it seem to match with our experience any more. Some of us yearn for the Christian Past, where everything was simple, and some of us yearn for the Technological Future, where everything will be exciting. Right now, we stand at the threshold of a dream becoming reality. Right now, the historical pattern of religion and culture is again repeating.
In the year 226AD in Persia, the old Parthian Dynasty which had ruled for over 400 years and which had become bloated and corrupt finally fell. Ardashir II, the first king of the new Sassanid Dynasty, came to the throne and began reorganising the country into his own model.
The rules of the previous dynasties had been largely benevolent for the people, but they were regularly conscripted into wars against the numerous threats to the land, including Classical Athens and the Roman Empire . These military victories had been easy and demonstrated Persian power across the ancient world. And of course, every Persian citizen or slave knew that his country was backed and blessed by the infinite power of Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian God of Light and the Sky.
The Zoroastrians themselves had a remarkable religion, which at the time was almost unique in the world. Only the Jews in Israel had come up with a system of monotheism, but the Zoroastrians were the world’s first dualists. They believed in Ahura Mazda, an all-powerful and benevolent God of Light, and took his side against the evil Angra Mainyu, the Demiurge and evil Demon who was the ancestor of our Devil. They often prayed to fire, as a shining example of Ahura Mazda’s light.
The people were not, it had to be said, especially devout or religious, but the knowledge that the Great God was with them ensured bountiful confidence and a flowering of Persian culture. But there was something that Persia could not defend itself against, and it began to storm the country around the time of the opening of the Sassanid Dynasty. As Ardashir II passed away to be replaced by his son, Shapur I, the country was being flooded with evangelists bent on changing the national religion.
Christians came from Judaea and Greece , Manichaeanists from Mesopotamia , and even from within Ahura Mazda’s own country, the Zurvanists, and the great military might that was Persia could not stand in their way.
Things began to fall into flux. Mani, the prophet of the Mainchaeans was put to death in 274AD, the Zurvanists were preached against in the streets and the temples, and the Christians were ridiculed, but still the country remained in religious and cultural flux. Shapur I had even brought two Roman Emperors low and received their official submissions, but even this could not restore the confidence or resolve the unrest in the country.
It was time to take action, and it was the third Sassanian King, the ashen-faced Kartir I, who would do it. Kartir had been Shapur’s hardline chief priest, the source of much of the polemic against the heretics and unbelievers, and once ascending to the throne, he determined to stamp out all rival religions within Persia ’s borders. It was he who had ordered Mani’s death, he who crushed the Zurvanists and he who turned the once-beautiful Zoroastrianism into what history now knows as Mazdakism – a fundamentalist version of the religion in which the Law of Ohrmazd (as Ahura Mazda was now to be known) would be strictly obeyed on pain of death. Kartir I was to be the Divine Giver and Translator of that Law, and the whole population was to be permanently engaged in the war against Ahriman (or Angra Mainyu), to behave correctly and to be diligent in their worship of the Great God and His King.
As Kartir himself boasted on one of his stelae erected in the city of Naqsh-e-Rustam in the region of Shiraz:
“I defeated Ahriman, and turned the abodes of evil demons [Christian churches and Manichaean Temples] into thrones and seats of Ohrmazd. I chastised the Jews, the Christians, the Manichaeans and the Buddhists. Heretics and apostates who were within the Community of the Faithful were spared for the religion of the Worshippers of Ohrmazd and the rites of God, but not for propaganda. I chastised them and upbraided them and improved them.’
And so, for the next four hundred years, Persia was gripped by Fundamentalist Zoroastrianism and the population largely lived in either sullen obedience of abject misery. Gone was the artistic excellence of the Parthian and Seleucid Dynasties, to be replaced by iconoclastic images of strict religion. The Sassanid Dynasty held onto power in part by force and in part by the strict Mazdakism keeping the populace in check. There were also the wars, which brought the Christian cities of Alexandria and Byzantium into the Sassanid sphere, but it didn’t bring a resurgence in Persian culture.
The natural and effortless confidence that Persians had once had in their country was now a memory of the past.
Therefore, when a new world force began amassing in the Arabian Peninsula , it is little wonder that the populace of Persia welcomed them with open arms. In the period of just one generation, the Armies of Islam, centred initially on the cities of Mecca and Medina and later Damascus in Syria , stormed into Persia , overthrew the Sassanid King Yazdegird IV and brought it into the Umayyad Caliphate as little more than a regional territory.
No longer were the Persians masters of their own destinies in an Empire which at its height spread from Tunisia in the west to Afghanistan in the East. The power structures of the Sassanid Dynasty were slowly subsumed and transformed into the Caliphate and the society was arranged along Islamic lines, with strict separation the sexes and a tax for non-Muslims to match the zakat charitable donation that Muslim citizens had to pay by religious law.
Persia went into flux again, and in came the imams to convert the populace to Islam. A flicker of national pride remained in the Persian psyche, however, and most of them chose not the mainstream brad of Sunni Islam, but followed instead the Shi’a Islamic religion, with its hope of millennial satisfaction and freedom through the Hidden Imam.
Thus by 800AD, with Islam now as the national religion of Persia, the country again settled and stopped being in flux, and the religious culture of the country has remained Islamic to this day.
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In the above survey of 500 years of Iranian history, a distinct pattern can be seen hiding amongst the turmoil, events and flux of that time. It is a pattern which can be applied across the world to any culture which is undergoing some kind of transformation: Flow, Remould, Flow, Remould, Stone.
Let’s look at the above summary and retrace its path in terms of the historical pattern:
Flow: Zoroastrian religious culture begins to wane at exactly the time when the Parthian Dynasty falls and numerous other religions are vying for Iranian attention.
Remould: Kartir I remoulds Zoroastrianism into Mazdakism, a strict and unforgiving interpretation of the religion, which holds sway and dominates Iranian life for 400 years.
Flow: The armies of Islam launch out of the Arabian Peninsula and cause the now stagnant Persia to undergo another set of changes – that of being incorporated into the Umayyad Caliphate.
Remould: Imams and evangelists flood into Persia to convert the Iranians to Islam. The majority of them choose the Shi’a interpretation of Islam. Persia thus becomes a Shi’a state.
Stone: This final transformation and remoulding is set in stone and Iran, as the country is now known, remains a Shi’a Islamic culture more than 1400 years later.
The pattern now becomes clear – a confident culture falls for some reason into a state of flux (Flow), due either to its general state of stagnation or to the corruption of its rulers. A rise in fundamentalism seeks to defend the old ways (Remould) and a stricter version of the culture now holds sway for a short while. But this is not enough to hold back the tides of changes (Flow), and outside influences or an internal revolution overthrows the current order. Another period of setting the culture begins (Remould) followed by an often long period of conservatism or cultural confidence which effortlessly maintains the new culture.
This pattern can be applied almost universally across the board to any culture which is undergoing a major change. Let’s look for example at the Roman Empire in the late fourth century, which underwent this process remarkably rapidly:
The previously confident pagan Roman Empire , with its vast array of Mithraists, Cynics, Orphics, Gnostics and Maenads begins to perceive a serious threat – the rise of Christianity. The Emperor Constantine, seeking to unite an Empire which is beginning to tear itself apart (Flow), announces that Christianity is to be the new religion and while other faiths will be permitted, all the citizens should be encouraged to become Christians (Remould).
After Constantine’s death, however, the pagan Julian the Apostate comes to the Imperial Throne and overturns Constantine’s previous edict (Flow). He begins to introduce a fundamentalist pagan religion, and decrees that all citizens must follows its teachings. This religion actually outlaws many of the previous pagan cults that were permitted in the previously confident Empire, including Mithraism, Gnosticism and Orphism.
Julian dies in 363AD and successive Emperors repeal the pagan edict, until Theodosius in 379AD announces that Christianity shall be the only permitted religion throughout the Roman Empire (Remould) and that all citizens are to convert on pain of death.
At the very beginning of the fifth century, Rome is sacked by German invaders and the Imperial Throne falls, to be replaced by the power of the Catholic Church (Stone).
Move forward in time and it can be seen that our own Western culture is quite a long way through this process. The flow probably began in the 1400’s, as Europeans began to move away from the Catholic Flat World Universe.
Enter Nicolai Copernicus, who theorised that the Sun was the centre of the Universe, and that the Earth rotated around it in a yearly orbit. He and his adherents, like Kepler and Galileo, were persecuted for promulgating such beliefs, but they persisted. The arrival of the Renaissance synchronised with this theoretical change in our world view and caused the medieval culture of Europe to go into profound flux. It began to reform in two ways.
The first way, which largely took place in Europe, was to usher in the Age of Enlightenment, in which the ingenuity and dignity of mankind had been engineered by God, and by seeking knowledge of the world, the Great Plan of God could slowly be understood. This Deist Theology was exported to the New England colonies where it eventually laid the foundations of the American Constitution.
However, there was also the second way of remoulding. This was to retreat into fundamentalism. The rise of Protestant firebrands like Oliver Cromwell ensured that the culture of Europe regular sunk into misery. This misery was also exported to the New World , where its belated rise can be seen today as the Southern States rise in power compared to the liberal (and Deist) north.
But again, the Industrial Revolution and the mass movements of peoples – not only from rural villages to the countryside, but from old to New World – caused this remoulding to go into flux. The Victorian era was a time of clinging onto a social fabric which was slowly breaking apart, and by the time the Titanic sunk in 1912, this fabric had utterly collapsed.
That was nearly a hundred years ago, and at the time of writing, we have yet to see a full remoulding of Western culture into a form which could concretise as it did in Islamic Persia or the Christian Roman Empire. No sooner had the culturally and socially destructive First World War been concluded than feminism began to rise and become a world force. No sooner had the Second World War ended than the sexual revolution of the 1960s came along, followed by the Ecstasy Generation.
It seems at the present moment as if things will never stop flowing, as if it is moving too fast to remould. Several attempts at remoulding – among them 1930s feminism, Nazism, Christian and Islamic Fundamentalism, and even the ecological movement – have largely remained unsuccessful so far. (*1)
With more information at our fingertips, is it ever possible for the flow to remould?
I wonder how people in 3rd century Persia or 4th century Rome might have felt, when they were faced with such a barrage of new information. Perhaps they too started to wonder if it would ever end. In any case, the lessons from these two periods of history, and from the historical pattern of religious and cultural change, is clear enough, and that is: look to the future.
The pattern of history outlined here shows us that the current rise in both American Christian and Arabic Islamic Fundamentalism is not a phase of history that is destined to be successful. The Mazdakites of Iran and Julianite Pagans of Rome were no more successful in holding back the tide of history as will be ‘Reverend’ Phelps, Billy Graham or Osama bin Laden. Even the most hard-headed firebrand will have to learn to surf the changing wave or drown in the flood.
For no matter what is perceived by a culture or religion to be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, history flows onwards. It will reform. Perhaps it will only reform once mankind has started to migrate into space, or perhaps it will reform exactly so that we can do that confident in our own culture and where we belong in the Universe.
The only sure-fire thing is to follow the rollercoaster pattern of Flow Reform Flow Reform Stone and see what future we as a citizens of the world turn out to have.
© Bruce Rimell, June 2005
PS - Have you noticed that the pictures to accompany this essay have (apart from the map of the Sassanid country) consisted of what might be called a Gallery of Fundamentalists? Ask yourself honestly, do these firebrands really look like the sort of people we should be listening to and allowing to set the course of our lives? Do they really seem like good people to determine the course of the future? Notice that at least three of them are depicted with their mouths open, fingers waving in the air, demanding that we listen. Notice that four of them are wearing a frown on their angry, all-too-serious brows...
Notes
(*1) – Let me clarify that statement. Feminism and Ecological movements have both been successful at getting into the mainstream and becoming dominant cultural forces (and forces for good, at that), but neither of them have been able to stop or reduce the state of flux in Western society.
References
John R Hinnells – ‘Persian Mythology (Library of the Worlds Myths and Legends Series)’ – 1985, Hamlyn Press
Paul Kriwaczek – ‘In Search of Zarathustra’ – 2002, Phoenix Press
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