Zarathustra's Persian name for the cosmic Sun-Being, identified by Rudolf Steiner as the Christ-Logos before incarnation.
Ahura Mazda in Anthroposophy is the Persian name Zarathustra gave to the great spiritual reality dwelling behind the physical sun. In Rudolf Steiner's lecture of 19 January 1911 in Berlin (GA 60, Turning Points in Spiritual History), the term is translated as "Great Aura" or "Wise Lord," the Persian noun ahura (lord) joined to mazda (wisdom). Steiner reads Zarathustra's revelation in the Ancient Persian cultural epoch as a direct seeing of the Sun-Logos, the same cosmic Christ-Being who, centuries later, would descend through the Jordan baptism and accomplish the Mystery of Golgotha. In Steiner's Christology, then, the Persian Ahura Mazda and the Christ Impulse name the same Being at two stages: the prophetic anticipation from the sun, and the incarnated reality on the earth. Modern application: Sergei Prokofieff's Goetheanum research traces this Zarathustra-Christ stream as a continuous esoteric line.
Ahura Mazda is the Persian-epoch name for what Steiner calls the Sun-Logos. Zarathustra, the great initiate of the Ancient Persian cultural epoch, taught his disciples to see behind the physical sun a Solar Spirit, the Wise Lord (Ahura Mazdao), who in the cosmic future would draw nearer the earth and finally incarnate as Christ at the Jordan baptism.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now, Zarathustra named all that lies hidden within and beyond man's mere apprehension of the physical sun, 'Aura Mazda' or 'Ahura Mazdao', and considered this element as important to our spiritual experiences and conditions, as is the physical sun to the wellbeing of plants and animals, and all that lives upon the face of the earth. There behind the physical sun lies the Spiritual Master, The Creator, 'Ahura Mazdao' or 'Aura Mazda', and from 'Ahura Mazdao' came the name, 'Ormuzd', or, 'The Spirit of Light'.
What it Means Today
The decisive point in Steiner's reading is what most comparative-religion surveys miss: Zarathustra was not founding a separate sun-cult parallel to other ancient theologies. He was seeing, with the cleared spiritual sight of an Ancient Persian initiate, the actual cosmic Sun-Being. The name Ahura Mazda was the Persian word given to that perceived reality. Steiner's Christology then takes a step few traditions take. The Sun-Logos whom Zarathustra called Ahura Mazda is, for Steiner, the same Being who in the fullness of time descended into the body of Jesus of Nazareth at the Jordan baptism and accomplished, three years later, the Mystery of Golgotha. Zarathustra and the Hebrew prophets were therefore not pointing at different gods. They were tracking one cosmic Being approaching the earth from the periphery, until that Being entered history at one place and one date.
This reading has a contemporary research line. Sergei Prokofieff, working at the Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science in Dornach until his death in 2014, devoted several volumes to the Zarathustra-Christ thread, tracing how the individuality of Zarathustra himself reincarnated as one of the two Jesus children and prepared, in his own biography, the vessel for the Christ Impulse he had once seen flaming from the sun. The Persian-epoch will-against-matter consciousness, the recognition of light battling darkness for the human soul, becomes in this view the long preparation for an event the Persians could only anticipate from afar.
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