From Polytheism to Monotheism: Zoroaster and Some Economic Theory

Abstract

The prophet Zoroaster founded the first monotheistic religion in history, which once rose to great imperial status and still survives unchanged today despite centuries of Muslim pressure. Unlike the founders of other monotheistic religions after him, he achieved this not through the overthrow of the original Iranian polytheism but through its deep reform—a strategy that made acceptance easier and ensured a continuing role for the priests. Monotheistic reform is thus a third way out of ancient Indo-European polytheism, besides extinction in the Greco-Roman case and mutation into sectarian theism in the Indian case. This paper surveys the Iranian story and offers two economic models to account for the two key factors that made the transition to monotheism possible: the theological structure and the role of the priesthood.

Religion without doctrine or clergy: the case of Ancient Greece

“…Like the Ancient Iranian and Indian religions, the Greek religion was bequeathed by the ancestors. But unlike the Greek religion, the Zoroastrian Iranians and the Vedic Indians for centuries transmitted orally collections of ritual hymns, not myths, which because of their holiness became fixed already in the oral period (Basuchoudhary et al, 2020;Ferrero, 2021). Lacking a systematic doctrine and a standardized text, the Greek religion was transmitted through what Boyer (2001) calls 'imagistic acquisition of religious concepts' which is based on performance and participation in rituals, as opposed to doctrinal transmission by an organized class of religious specialists (Larson, 2016: 191-194).…”

“…This subsection investigates whether priests join an interest group drawing on the works of Murrell (1984) and more recently Ferrero (2021) on the optimal size of interest group membership. Like their work, it compares the benefit and costs of increased number of members, but unlike them, since it is not a priori clear whether a priest joins or not the group, it considers the benefit from membership as probabilistic rather than certain.…”

“…Similarly, Ferrero (2021) concludes that theology and an organized priesthood account for the radical transformation of the ancient Iranian polytheism to Zoroastrianism, founded by the prophet Zoroaster around the middle of the second millennium BCE, which became the dominant religion of Persia for more than a millennium (until the arrival of Islam in the 7th century).…”