Steiner's name for the post-Atlantean polarity between the settled, nature-transforming Zarathustra-people of Iran and the nomadic Turanians of decadent astral clairvoyance.
Iranians and Turanians are the two early post-Atlantean peoples Rudolf Steiner sets in opposition in his 1910 Bern cycle. The southern Iranians, led by Zarathustra, worked to transform nature on the physical plane through spiritual force. The northern Turanians kept a lower, decadent clairvoyance, disliked labour, and let nature run wild. From this contrast Steiner traces the Ormuzd and Ahriman duality.
In Steiner's Own Words
The Turanians in the north towards Siberia, who had inherited a lower astral clairvoyance, had no desire to establish external civilization, and their passive disposition, influenced by many priests who practised magic, led them frequently to occupy themselves with lower magic, and even black magic. To the south, the Iranians, with an inclination to influence the sense-world by their human spiritual force, were working in a primitive way at the beginnings of civilization. This is the great contrast between Iranians and Turanians. These facts are expressed in a beautiful myth, the legend of Djemjid. Djemjid was a king who led his people from the north towards Iran, and who received from the God, whom he called Ahura Mazdao, a golden dagger, by means of which he was to fulfil his mission on earth.
What it Means Today
Steiner is reading a spiritual cause behind a contrast that scholarship of ancient Iran also records, the long tension between settled farmers and raiding nomads on the Central Asian steppe. Mary Boyce, Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, set this milieu out in volume one of her A History of Zoroastrianism (E.J. Brill, 1975). Boyce locates Zarathustra among an early Iranian people of herders and cattle-keepers, hemmed by hostile nomads, and shows how the Gathas, the oldest Avestan hymns, raise that lived friction into a cosmic choice between Ahura Mazda, lord of order and pasture, and the destructive spirit that ruins the world. In Yasna 30, the famous hymn of the two spirits, the worshipper is asked to choose the truthful, life-building way over the deceitful one that wastes the herds and the fields. The settled and the wild become two moral directions, not just two ways of getting food.
That is the same fork Steiner names with the words Ormuzd and Ahriman. Where Boyce reconstructs the Avestan dualism from text and archaeology, Steiner reads it as an inner event: the Iranians choose to spiritualize nature, the Turanians let it sink. The Thalira synthesis: the golden dagger of King Djemjid is the mythic seed of every tool that turns wilderness into cultivated land, which is why Steiner files this polarity under the will and the gold of the solar centre rather than under dreamy clairvoyance. Read the entry this way and the ancient Persian epoch stops being a costume drama and becomes a map of two enduring postures toward the earth, the hand that works it and spiritualizes it, and the hand that merely takes from it and lets it fall. Steiner places the war between Iran and Turan, and the kings Guschtasb and Ardschasb, at the head of this same stream.
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