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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Chatty, erudite and kaleidoscopic, 24 Oct 2005
Kriwaczek tells us that he has been fascinated by Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) since his school days, when his English teacher introduced the class to Nietzsche, and this pupil, "naturally enough ... went to the school library to find out what he had written", and found Thus Spake Zarathustra. Kriwaczek's book now purports to be a search for this elusive character, working backwards in time from Nietzsche. This quest would, as an adult (and at times as a television journalist), involve him in travelling all over the Middle East, Iran and Central Asia. The result is this vividly written account of his physical journeys in these lands, peppered with historical disquisitions, written with equal vividness, but whose origins, I suspect, had come from some decent libraries and guide books before he set out. In any case this is not the easiest way to convey a clear picture of the subject, and the problem is aggravated by two other features: the first is a helter-skelter backwards and forwards in time and in space. So, for example we travel within a few pages of one chapter from Carcassonne in France (p.74) to Derbent on the Caspian (p.75); a page later we are on the Trans-Siberian railway (p.76); on p.77 we are with the 13th century Tartars and on p.79 with 5th century BC Sarmatians! The other feature is that Kriwaczek is so entertainingly knowledgeable about so much that he devotes pages on matters which have only the thinnest link with Zoroastrianism. Zarathustra himself had only one god, Ahura Mazda, and described all the other deities of his time as not deserving of the name. A very long time after his death, as Zoroastrianism departed from the original view of the prophet, it produced another god called Mithra, who seems to have borne a very similar relationship to Ahura Mazda as Jesus would bear to God the Father. Now the Romans also worshipped a god called Mithra, but, although Kriwaczek tells us that some modern scholars think that it was a mere coincidence that the same name was given to two gods who had nothing to do with each other, he devotes 2/3 of that chapter to telling us everything he knows about this Roman Mithras. Truth to tell, in the course of the book we really learn far more about Nietzsche, the Cathars, the Bogomils, the Sarmatians, the Romans, the Manichaeans and the Jews than we do about Zarathustra. Kriwaczek knows so much history that the slightest link he can establish with Zarathustra's teaching (or its later perversions) is enough to get him to unpack it all. The penultimate chapter ends, "Having mapped the Persian seer's influence back through the two and a half millennia that separate our own era from the dawn of Persian civilization, what remains in to seek out the traces of a time before ... recorded Iranian history began - the days of the First Prophet himself." It was therefore with some eagerness that I looked forward to the last chapter for a comprehensive account of what Zarathustra stood for, but I found it a rather thin harvest. Yes, very likely Zarathustra was the first monotheist, the first who spoke of the End of Time, the first who saw life as a battle between Good and Evil, the first who taught that mankind has a choice between them, the first who summed up the duties of man as "Good Words, Good Thoughts, and Good Deeds". Yes, if we dig down through Judaism, Christianity and Islam, we can find a Zoroastrian substratum. And yes, I do understand that Kriwaczek would not call that a thin harvest; and I can see his point. In any case, this is a rattling good read. There is a wealth of information here - some of it quite startling (for instance, that much of what we call Gothic is actually Sarmatian); the patches of history he tells us about are exciting and little known to the general reader; his enthusiasm is infectious; and his word painting is superb. The book was not what I expected from the title or what I think it ought to have been, but I enjoyed every page of it and am very glad I read it.
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