in search of zarathustra by paul kriwaczek

However, his work was completely discredited by contemporaries. To do so he endured an extraordinary adventure braving plague-ravaged ships, colonial wars, disease, jungles, tigers, time in prison and even a duel before succeeding in his aim. It is the story of Duperron an amateur French historian who made it his life’s mission to obtain Zoroastrian texts and translate them. The story of the acquisition and translation of these texts is one of the most interesting parts of the book. Kriwaczek traces this modern interest back to Wagner and Nietzsche, whose interest was in turn influenced by the work of philologists for whom the translation of Zoroastrian texts played a key role in the formation of the theory of an Indo-European family tree of languages stretching back to ancient Sanskrit.

In the modern world we mainly encounter Zoroaster (the Greek version of Zarathustra) through Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is a fascinating journey of eccentric characters, strange heresies, prophets and reformers and the origins of pivotal religious ideas. Passing via Nietzsche's interpretation of Zarathustra for a post-religious age, the Cathars of 13th-century France, the Bulgars of 9th-century Balkans, and the prophet Mani's revision of Zarathustra's message in the later Persian empire, Paul Kriwaczek then explores the religion of Mithras ' before going back past Alexander the Great's destruction of the Persian Empire, and the era of the great Persian kings Cyrus and Darius in the 6th century BC, to the beginning of the first pre-Christian millennium.In In Search for Zarathustra, author Paul Kriwaczek traces the influence of this ancient religion and its revolutionary prophet from modern times to the European Enlightenment, to the Middle and Dark Ages, to Late Antiquity and Early Christian eras, into ancient Persian and Babylonian Empires and finally to a time before written language and settled society.

Over several decades, Paul Kriwaczek, an award-winning television producer, has cast his film-maker's eye across Europe and Central Asia, from Hadrian's Wall to the Oxus river, from the Pyrenees to the Hindu Kush.

Long before the first Hebrew temple, before the birth of Christ or the mission of Muhammad, Zarathustra had taught of a single universal god, of the battle between Good and Evil, of the Devil, Heaven and Hell, and of an eventual end to the world. IN SEARCH OF ZARATHUSTRA is a quest to trace the influence of the prophet the Greeks called Zoroaster and considered the greatest religious legislator of the ancient world.

In search of zarathustra by paul kriwaczek