Notes on Zervanism in the Light of Zaehner's Zurvan, with Additional References

HERE is a notorious discrepancy among our sources on religion under the Sassanids. According to the foreign witnesses, most of them Christians writing in Armenian or Syriac, the supreme god was Zurvan, the father of Ormazd and Ahriman. This evidence is born out by only one, late, native source, the Ulemd i Islam. All the Pahlavi writings give the very different picture of a dualistic system in which Zurvan has hardly any part to play. Of Zaehner's predecessors in trying to reconcile this divergence, some, like Christensen, have supposed that Sassanian religion was in fact Zervanism, but that the Muslim conquest brought about a dualistic reaction which tried-with almost complete success-to expurgate from the sacred writings all that was redolent of Zervanism; others-among whom I am sorry I must count myself-have tried to minimize the difference, treating the Zervanite traits in the Pahlavi texts as traces of a tendency which could never prevail. A middle course between these two extremes was struck a quarter of a century ago by 0. von Wesendonk (in a book which I was not able to see before writing my Ormazd et Ahriman);2 this path, thanks to Zaehner, has now become, so to speak, the royal highway to the solution of the riddle. Before we proceed, however, rapidly to follow him in this direction, we should stress the fact that he has limited himself to Zervanism from the Sassanian times onwards. He makes but brief references to the question whether it had already been in existence for several centuries. This question, with its corollary of a possible influence of Zervanism on Greek philosophy and Orphism, has been perhaps the liveliest subject of research and controversy among Iranists3 for the last twentyfive years. Widengren has adduced evidence from Nuzi tablets of the twelfth century;4 Junker, Schaeder and Nyberg have seen the fourfold Zurvan in the inscription of Antiochus of Commagene: an interpretation which Zaehner, pages 20 and 31, justly criticizes;5 to the testimony of Eudemos apud Damascius he makes sporadic allusions, as well as to the mentions of Zurvan in the Avesta. Nyberg, in his famous Religionen des alten Iran, has tried to view the whole Avesta in the perspective of a religious history with Zurvan as the high god, especially in the west of Iran. On his traces, Widengren and Wikander have tackled the perilous task of unraveling the different traditions which may be surmised to have converged into the Avesta. This