Eary Iranian Dualism (Erano-Aryan Dualism)

Eranian (Iranian) thought and worldview has long recognized and articulated a dualistic worldview. In research conducted by Western sociologists, philosophers, and theologians, however, this dualism has often been inaccurately reduced to a simple opposition between good and evil, particularly in relation to Zoroastrianism. Yet such an interpretation is already the interpretation of a later and historically particular religious form, not necessarily of the more original metaphysical structure that preceded it. This short essay shows where Eranian dualism is situated and how it was understood.

Introduction

Throughout Eranian history, we encounter a deep, sophisticated account of what Eranians understood by the duality of things. This suggests that a pervasive dualism lies at the very core of the Eranian and Aryan worldview. The argument of this essay is therefore not primarily that Zoroastrianism itself is “correct,” nor that its later doctrinal formulations should be accepted as normative, but rather that beneath Zoroastrianism, and partially preserved through it, there lies an older and more foundational structure of thought. This underlying structure, I argue, belongs to the pre-Zoroastrian Eranian or Aryan horizon and can still be traced, however fragmentarily, in later traditions.

Such a dualism can be identified not only in Zoroastrian texts, but also in the iconography of Roman Mithraism, in Mani’s worldview and teachings, in Eranian influences on Buddhism, as well as in the Rigveda, the Upanishads, and later Sufi teachings. These traditions are not here treated as identical, nor as equally faithful witnesses. Rather, they are approached as preserving echoes, fragments, transformations, or structural continuities of an older worldview that was never fully erased, even when it was reformulated. Zoroastrianism thus appears not as the final or definitive expression of Eranian truth, but as one major historical redaction of a more ancient inheritance.

In this sense, the present text is not merely descriptive but also apologetic. It seeks not only to analyze an old worldview, but to defend the legitimacy of recovering its underlying foundations against later simplifications, reductions, and dogmatic closures. Its aim is reconstructive: to move behind the later theological and doctrinal layers in order to retrieve the deeper principles from which they once emerged.

Truth and truth

The dualism or duality discussed here is primordial in nature. It is rooted in Truth itself, understood as the ultimate substance of being. In order to understand this duality, one must first clarify what is meant by “Truth”. Truth, derived from the meaning of Arda (Middle Eranian), Arta, Asha (Avestan), or Rta (Rigveda), also approximately known as Dharma (Buddhism, Hinduism), and later also associated with Haqq in Sufism, does not refer to the truth-value of a sentence or proposition.

Rather, Truth refers to that according to which everything within the realm of reality ought to be aligned. It denotes a given principle that must be applied in order for things to remain in, or return to, a correct or proper state (Truth-bearing state). For this reason, it is sometimes translated as order or cosmic order. Accordingly, Truth may also be described as cosmic Truth. For the sake of simplicity, however, it will continue to be referred to here simply as Truth, with a capital T.

Truth in this sense is not logical before it is ontological; it is not first something spoken, but something that is. It is the real measure of being, the norm according to which all things stand rightly within reality. To speak of Truth here is therefore to speak of the lawful and luminous structure of being (or existence) itself, not merely of correctness in judgment. Later traditions preserved this insight under different names and with different emphases, but the underlying intuition remained the same: there is an order of reality prior to human opinion, and alignment with it determines whether a being, an act, or a world stands in its proper state.

Whereas Truth itself is singular and cannot be reduced to any form of duality, its manifestations in being and reality are twofold. This may be called the primordial duality, most prominently preserved in Eranian thought and originally also present in the Rigvedic tradition, although in the latter it was gradually forgotten or lost over time. In the Eranian sphere, by contrast, this primordial worldview and its corresponding duality remained alive: in a reformed or revised form in Zoroastrianism, and more broadly in the consciousness and cultural memory of the Eranian people, regardless of whether they belonged to Zoroastrian or other Eranian religious and intellectual traditions, or later to Islamic Sufi currents.

This point is decisive: the duality in question is not a duality of two ultimate truths, nor simply of two moral substances. It is the duality of the manifestation of one Truth. Truth itself is one; yet in the way it becomes accessible, operative, and present in reality, it appears in two irreducible but complementary modes. The failure to distinguish between Truth itself and its twofold manifestation has, in my view, contributed greatly to the misunderstanding of Eranian dualism.

Expressions of Truth

What is meant by the expressions of Truth? The term “expression” may, strictly speaking, be somewhat imprecise, since it implies a directed act. Yet the way in which the expression of Truth is understood here is not as a deliberate motion or action, but rather as a condition through which human beings, as participants in reality, may comprehend how Truth manifests itself. And this manifestation is twofold.

The first mode is inward, luminous, innate, and immediate. It is grasped not through discursive inference, but through vision, attunement, proper contemplation, or direct inner recognition. The second mode is outward, formed, and investigable; emergent. It is grasped through observation, encounter, pattern, causality, and the exploration of the world as constituted. The first belongs to the unseen and the supra-sensory; the second to the manifested and embodied. Both are real, both belong to Truth, and neither is sufficient on its own. This distinction between subjective, innate intuition and objective, ascending empiricism has been a central theme of Eranian philosophy since antiquity, and constitutes a core element of the Eranian understanding of reality.

The reason for this duality in the manifestation of Truth – and this constitutes the hypothesis of the present short essay – is that, at an early stage, the Aryans divided their understanding of reality into a realm of light and a realm of matter. The realm of light was regarded as the origin of the gods, whereas the realm of matter was the sphere upon which they acted. Within this framework, the world that was acted upon, created, and formed – the world of matter – was understood as having been constituted according to the principles of Truth. These principles were epistemologically accessible through exploration, observation, and understanding. At the same time, there had to be another force, one existing above the created sphere itself, acting in the unseen, defining the rules, and residing beyond immediate material access. This force was accessible only through subjective, innate contemplation and vision.

This distinction also gave rise to the symbolic contrast between light and darkness: light as the domain of intelligibility, order, and proximity to Truth – encompassing the light and the light induced matter -, and darkness not as an independent principle equal to light, but as the condition of obscuration, distance, or privation where Truth is no longer immediately present – acting through darkness induced matter.

What later traditions often recast as theology may originally have been a more primordial metaphysics. The realm of light was not merely a heavenly “place” inhabited by divine beings; it was the domain of pure intelligibility, normativity, and formative power. The realm of matter, by contrast, was not evil in itself, but the domain of embodiment, mixture, limitation, and process. To confuse matter with evil is, from this perspective, already to introduce a later simplification. The more original distinction is between the unembodied source and the embodied field of realization.

This also means that the usual reduction of Eranian dualism to ethics alone is insufficient. Ethical dualism may indeed be one later consequence of this worldview, but it is not its deepest layer. Before the contrast between good and evil stands a more primordial distinction between luminous origin and material manifestation, between contemplative access and empirical access, between what gives form and what receives form.

From this early structure, the duality of the Eranian episteme emerged; this idea will be developed further in subsequent essays.

What is proposed here, in this short essay, is that neither intuitive, innate, (melioratively) irrational Truth alone, nor observable, objective Truth alone, is sufficient to account for the constitution and substance of reality. In order to grasp Truth fully, one must engage not only in the rational search for Truth, but also in its irrational and immaterial faculty.

The word “irrational” should here be understood carefully and perhaps even replaced. What is meant is not the absence or negation of reason, but that which exceeds discursive reason: the supra-rational, noetic, contemplative, or visionary faculty. The error of modernity has often been to reduce knowledge to what can be objectified, measured, and externally verified. The error of mysticism, on the other hand, can be to sever inward insight from the world of embodied reality. The older Eranian synthesis, as reconstructed here, refused both reductions.

Thus, reality cannot be understood by empiricism alone, because empiricism knows only what has already become manifest. But neither can reality be understood by intuition alone, because intuition without embodiment remains untested, unformed, and incomplete. Truth requires both inward participation and outward investigation. One must see and one must examine. One must contemplate and one must discern. One must receive the light and also understand its formation in the world.

This is the deeper dualism I seek to recover and promote: not a crude opposition of two hostile principles, but a twofold articulation of one ultimate reality. Its apologetic force lies precisely in this claim: that the ancient Eranian worldview possessed a richer and more adequate account of reality than later dogmatic or reductionist readings have allowed, and that redescovering this worldview remains philosophically and spiritually necessary.

This will build the foundation for re-establishing the Mithraic worldview.

If a Mithraic worldview is to be defined, it cannot be based merely on the dogmas of later Zoroastrianism, nor from modern romantic projection, but only from the rediscovery of those deeper foundations that precede both. Such an endeavor seeks the primordial architecture of Truth, light, matter, contemplation, order, and embodiment that once stood behind later religious forms. Only on that basis can Mithraism, or a renewed Eranian metaphysics, be recovered in a meaningful way.