Humanity too, however, had a part to play. Mortal men and women everywhere needed to commit themselves to the cause of light: to live in such a way as to render themselves branches of living flame. Fortunately, they were not without guidance from the Lord of the Universe on how best to achieve this. Many centuries earlier, a man named Zoroaster had seen a vision. Emerging from a ritual immersion in a river, into the luminous purity of a spring dawn, he found himself suddenly bathed by the infinitely purer light of Ohrmazd. Words sounded in his head: the teachings of the divine. For the first time, the Supreme Creator had revealed Himself to a mortal as He truly was: the fountainhead of all that was good. Over the succeeding years, Zoroaster witnessed many more visions. The nature of the cosmos was revealed to him, and the rituals by which he and all mortals should lead their lives. Forced into exile by the refusal of his own people to listen to his teachings, he succeeded in winning converts in a strange land. These new followers, despite all the efforts of neighbouring tribes to crush them, eventually triumphed in war; their infant religion endured and thrived. Zoroaster himself, through whom the revelations of Ohrmazd had been perfectly refracted, would be commemorated ever afterwards as the human equivalent of a sacred fire: as a divinely forged link between heaven and earth. This, in the opinion of his followers, was what it meant to be a mathran, a “possessor of the words of God”—a prophet.
“For Zoroaster alone has heard Our commands.” So Ohrmazd Himself had pronounced. “He alone has made known Our thoughts.”33 A ringing commendation—and one that ensured that the priests who followed Zoroaster’s teachings displayed a steely and unblinking concern for propriety. As they tended the sacred fires, they adhered to the regular performance of ferociously complicated rituals, knowing that each one completed would see the order of the cosmos buttressed. Yet the priests could not hope to take the fight to Ahriman unaided. Others too had to be steeled to the cosmic fight. Even the lowest slave might have a part to play. If he only performed the five daily prayers that Zoroaster had demanded of the faithful, and kept his teeth shiny clean to boot, he too could help to purge the Lie. Understandably, then, the priests of Iranshahr sought to keep a tight leash on the beliefs and behaviour of their countrymen. As one foreign commentator observed, “Nothing is held to be lawful or right among the Persians unless it is first ratified by a priest.”34 Without such discipline, there could be no prospect of winning the great battle for the universe.
Yet, ultimately, in the spiritual dimension as well as the earthly, one protagonist mattered more than any other: the Shahanshah himself. He alone could claim to have been touched by the divine. Asha—that supreme virtue of Ohrmazd—could not possibly be maintained without him. Nor, indeed, could the privileges and pretensions of the priesthood. Ahriman, in the malignancy of his cunning, had always been assiduous in his attempts to cultivate heresy and demon-worship. Not every corner of Iranshahr had been illumined by the light of Zoroaster’s teachings. While some of the Iranians’ ancient gods—the Lady Anahita pre-eminent among them—had come to be ranked by the Zoroastrian priesthood as loyal lieutenants of Ohrmazd, others, so Zoroaster himself had warned, were not gods at all, but demons. Their cults, idols and adherents all needed smashing. Only the Shahanshah, in the final reckoning, was up to the job. If the religion of Zoroaster, instituted of Ohrmazd Himself, self-evidently existed to serve as the protector of humanity, then it was the function of kingship, in the opinion of the priesthood, to serve as “the protector of religion.”35
A role to which the House of Sasan, over the years, had only fitfully measured up. Although many kings had certainly been piously Zoroastrian, many had not. The royal understanding of what Asha should be was not necessarily that of the priesthood. Religion, in the opinion of the Persian monarchy, existed to buttress the power of the throne—not the other way round. Any notion that the Zoroastrian establishment might be permitted to obtain an identity that was independent of royal control, let alone political leverage, had long been anathema to the Sasanians. Accordingly, for all that priests were often employed by the monarchy as attack-dogs, they were never let off the leash. Any hint that they might be slipping their collars had always seen them thrust firmly back into their kennels. Petted and spoiled though they might be, they were never allowed to forget who held the whip hand.
But now, amid the calamities and convulsions of the times, that was starting to change. As the Persian monarchy, battered by the onslaughts of the Hephthalites, scrabbled desperately to shore up its position, the Zoroastrian establishment seized its chance. The priests who had provided Peroz with his Kayanid ancestry were in a position to exact a considerable price for their collaboration. Not all their energies had been devoted to serving the royal interest. In their redrafted history of Persia, the priests had given themselves the role they had always dreamed of playing: that of partner, indeed twin, of the Shahanshah. “Born of the one womb—joined together and never to be sundered.”36 Earlier Sasanian kings would have scorned—and punished—such presumption. But Peroz did not, because he could not: his situation had grown too desperate. Rather than dismiss the pretensions of the priesthood as mere conceit, to be slapped down with disdain, he had little choice but to indulge the clergy, and then take advantage of what could be screwed out of them in return. Better a marriage of convenience than no marriage at all.
And certainly, despite the many tensions that remained between them, the monarchy and the priesthood shared similar goals. Just as it had been the ambition of Peroz to bring the antique order of the Kayanids to his tottering realm, the priests wished to enshrine the even more transcendent order of Ohrmazd within Iranshahr. It was only with an unwearying effort, of course, that such a campaign could ever hope to be won. Laws, long disregarded or only fitfully applied, had to be given added teeth. The guardians of light and truth had to be prepared “to smite, to smash and to overthrow the idol-temples and the disobedience that comes from the Adversary and the demons.”37 Naturally, the greatest responsibility of all still lay with the Shahanshah; but the Zoroastrian priesthood too, as it increasingly began to slip royal control, had set to carve out its own, independent role. Across the empire, the power of the provincial governors was being matched, and sometimes even eclipsed, by that of the mowbeds—the chief priests. Officially, of course, these men remained answerable to the Shahanshah; but already, back in the reign of Peroz’s father, there had been the unmistakable glimmerings of an alternative chain of command. For the first time, there had been mention made of a modaban mowbed—a “chief of chief priests.” Here, putting down deeper roots with each decade that passed, was an institution that could claim to embody Asha indeed. The word that best described it, however, was not Persian at all, but Greek. What the priests were creating, in effect, was an ecclesia—a “church.”