The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s1.6

v2.c41.s1.6

The Persian inscriptions show Dareios I as a believer in Auramazdā, who is clearly the god of Zoroaster, not the sky god of the nature worship of the Persians, whose name Herodotos heard under a form akin to the Indian Dyaus. The devotion of Dareios to this god can be accounted for only by the view that he was the deity of his branch of the family of the Achaimenidai. Dareios had to struggle against the hostility of the Magoi, representing the traditional faith, and it was his earnestness under the influence of the prophet's teaching, which secured the sudden predominance of the Zoroastrian view, despite its abstract character and lack of popular elements. But this means that Zoroaster had lived just before Dareios or was still alive, for if he had lived some centuries before, and his religion had still at the time of Dareios been of so small account, it could never have suddenly expanded to important dimensions. This view, in Hertel's opinion, is strengthened by the terms used by Dareios himself, when he asserts that the earlier kings had failed to accomplish what in one year he had wrought by the aid of Auramazdā, and when he advises his successors to punish the adherents of the lie. His successors omit this warning, which was only in place when a new god was being first proclaimed. Under Artaxerxes II (404–359 B.C.) we find Auramazdā worshipped along with Mithra and Anāhita, showing the contamination of Zoroastrianism with the older nature worship under the influence of the Magoi, who had accepted the duty of preaching the new faith, but naturally permeated it with ideas of the older belief.