Two Mental Dimension of Evil in Zoroastrianism

About the Talk: One of the most original aspects of the Zoroastrian intellectual elaboration is its “mentalism.” This character is well visible from the extended development of many divine mental categories, starting from the denomination of its highest divinity, Ahura Mazda, whose name already contains an immediate reference to the idea of “mind” (*mns-dheH1-), but it is emphasized with the structural disposition of a radical antagonism between the two primordial “thoughts” (mainiiu-), the Incremental and the Hostile one (angra- or aŋra-). We can also recall the importance attributed to one of the Amǝša Spentas, such as the Manas (“mind”) who is Vohu, “good”, etc. Another very subtle categorization distinguishing the Mazdean doctrine concerns the presence of a double articulation of the existence, as “mental” (mainiiauua-) and “living” (gaēieiia-), terms which in the Pahlavi texts are translated as mēnōg and gētīg. This distinction has nothing of the antagonistic; on the contrary, Zoroastrianism does not show any derogative evaluation of nature, body, life, sex, etc, and does not know any particular feeling toward ascetism or mortification of physical life.

About the Speaker: Antonio Panaino is full Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Bologna, Department of Cultural Heritage. As a specialist of the Pre-Islamic Iranian world, Panaino’s work focusses on the religious and intellectual history of the Achae¬menid and Sasanian Empires with a strong philological approach to primary sour-ces in Avestan, Old Persian, Pahlavi, etc., with a careful attention for the intercultural phe¬no¬mena involving the neighbouring civilizations, such as the Babylonian, the Greek, the Indian, and the Byzantine ones. After his doctoral thesis dedicated to the cult of the star Sirius, Tištrya (Tištrya. I: The Avestan Hymn to Sirius, and II: The Iranian Myth of the Star Sirius, Rome, IsMEO, 1990, 1995) and to the Sun and the Moon in the Zoroastrian framework, he focused some of his researches on the origin of the demonization of the planets, and to the development of the Iranian uranography (A Walk through the Iranian Heavens. For a History of an Unpredictable Dialogue between Nonspherical and Spherical Models, Irvine 2019; reprint, Brill, Leiden, 2020). Further investigations concern the afterlife (The “River of Fire” and the “River of Molten Metal”. A Historico-Theological Rafting Through the Rapids of the Christian and Mazdean Apokatastatic Falls, Wien 2021) and the esoteric dimension of the sacerdotal functions within the Mazdean liturgic tradition (Le collège sacerdotal avestique et ses dieux. Aux origines indo-iraniennes d’une tradition mimétique, Turnhout: Brepols, 2023).