Talk:Mazdaism

Requested move 16 March 2025

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) Frost 15:30, 23 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Mazdaism (religions) → Mazdaism – Unnecessary disambiguation. Skyerise (talk) 12:58, 16 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The reason behind the placement of (religions) is the word Mazdaism, which is used as another name in Zoroastrianism and Mazdakism, and for this reason it must be noted.
But it can also be written Mazdaism religions Hzea (talk) 15:45, 16 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It shouldn't be noted in the title; it should be noted in a hatnote. Skyerise (talk) 22:37, 16 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Zoroastrianism and Mazdakism are also religions, so this disambiguator isn't actually disambiguating anything. jlwoodwa (talk) 21:21, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Dubious

I find the whole article rather dubious. Most of the sources are non-English, no quotations are provided, and I doubt that the sources say they are about "Mazdaism". Without quotations, translations, etc., it is impossible to tell whether disallowed synthesis is occurring here. Skyerise (talk) 23:50, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In Western scholarship, Mazdaism is the name for the orthodox form of Zoroastrianism and is used in contrast to Zurvanism, a now extinct branch of Zoroastrianism. This usage is in complete contradiction to the content of this article, which describes Mazdaism as a non-Zoroastrian religion that also focuses on the worship of Mazda. While many scholars of Zoroastrianism speculate as to whether (Ahura) Mazda was also worshipped before Zarathustra, there is definitely no consensus on this issue. Given that Zoroastrians have traditionally called their own religion Mazdayasna, i.e., Mazda whorship, it is considered unlike that he played a prominent role outside of Zoroastrianism.
The usage of the term Mazdaism within the scope of this article therefore looks highly idiosyncratic and the religious phenomenon described therein does not seem to be based on much, if any, scholary research. It may be a position within russian scholarship, but this is difficult to tell. Within Western (as well as Iranian) scholarship, I have never encoutered it. I am not sure how to handle this situation but it seems that a warning or possibly deletion are appropriate in this case. Kjansen86 (talk) 16:28, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What is this article even about

Personally, I am not convinced that this article describes a single coherent phenomenon. In fact, it seems to mix different phenomena and refers to them in different parts of the article.

At first, the article seems to argue for the existence of a religion which arose "in the early centuries of the first millennium", i.e., many centuries after Zarathustra's reforms. The article names this religion Mazdaism and gives the name in Armenian, seemingly arguing that this religion was especially prevalent in Armenia. This supposed religion allegedly had a number of similarities with Zoroastrianism, but ultimately differed from it. On the one hand, modern scholarship recognizes the existence of non-Zoroastrian as well as heterodox Zoroastrian religious phenomena in Greater Iran during antiquity. Examples would be Manichaeism, Zurvanism or Mazdakism. The rest, however, seem to have been local and very heterogeneous phenomena and I am not aware that anyone has claimed that they formed a single, widespread and coherent belief system. The article seems to implicitly acknowledge this, as it simply provides a list of different religious phenomena spanning different places and times, without establishing a unifying principle that would unite them.

The second phenomenon seems be pre-Zoroastrian beliefs of the Iranian people. This is for instance argued in the sections dealing with the relgious beliefs of the ancient Medes and Turanians. For this, however, a dedicated article already exist. There is therefore no need for another one.

Thirdly, the article seems to argue for a religion which existed alongside Zoroastrianism during the Achaemenid period. This is based on the observation that the Achaemenid kings worshipped Ahura Mazda but at the same time made no reference to Zarathustra. Some scholars have therefore argued that they were not Zoroastrians, which means that they followed another ancient Iranian religion which was centered around Ahura Mazda. This is a minority opinion among scholars, but not a fringe belief. It could therefore be the subject of a proper Wikipedia article. Such an article should however present the hypothetical nature of such a notion, its minority status among scholars and properly cite these scholars as well as counter opinions. Alas, the article does none of these things.

Finally, the naming of this article is highly misleading since Mazdaism is often used synonymous with Zoroastrianism. All in all, I think this article should be strongly revised of even be deleted.Kjansen86 (talk) 17:24, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. While it exists, it's being linked to from other articles, like Ahura Mazda#Before Zoroastrianism — almost at the top of the article. The sources cited there are also difficult to verify. One of them seems to be a Persian translation of The Persian Religion by Emile Benveniste, published 1929.
Anyway, the presence of a "See also" link on articles like that could give readers an impression of additional legitimacy, a sense that the content is pretty concrete and recognized as "a thing." I added tags to that section, but maybe it's used in this way elsewhere too. I don't know how to micromanage that. GlacialHorizon (talk) 09:08, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed split and merge with more specific articles

I propose merging Mazdaism into a few pages which cover the topic of Ahura Mazda worship more specifically (WP:MULTIPLESUBJECTS). As has been discussed here, the contents of the page seem to associate various types of pre- and post- Zoroastrian Ahura Mazda worship which don't necessarily have any relation to each other.

Parts of the present page could be merged into Ancient Iranian religion (for content about pre-Zoroastrian polytheistic worship), Turya (Avesta) and Medes (for the content in Trends), and even into the pages for relevant researchers (eg Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin) who are heavily referenced on this page.

Does this seem reasonable? If/when the article is deleted, where might Mazdaism redirect to?

ʊnƌer◙swamȹᵗᵅᵜᵏ 15:28, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

allikas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mazdaism_(religions)