Standalone bodies of writing — each its own argument, each tracing a thread of the Persian-Zoroastrian inheritance back to its source.
Different subjects, same project: tracing what Persia gave the world, and what the world owes back.
One thousand years ago, an old man died in a Persian garden. He had spent thirty years writing fifty thousand couplets to keep Zoroastrian Persia alive. It worked. A seven-part essay series for the millennium of his death — tracing the Shahnameh's deepest material back to the Avesta, the Yashts, and the priesthood who carried it through the centuries.
Read the series →A cited, source-driven study tracing how the deity of the Hebrew Bible developed across three thousand years — from the Shasu of YHW in 1400 BCE, through the Canaanite pantheon, to the Persian inheritance that reshaped him forever. Nine threads, forty-one primary documents, every claim sourced.
Enter the archive →Nine specimens of editorial activity in the Hebrew Bible, documented one at a time, at every scale from a single word to the entire Pentateuch. The Census. The Boundaries. The Awakening. The Promotion. The Foreign Tongue. The Names. The Two Voices. The Overlay. The Witness. The Verdict. Mainstream textual scholarship as the anchor, presented as a case file. The accumulation is the argument.
Enter the case file →Six installments tracing the religion of Zoroaster back through every recoverable layer of its prehistory — from the Proto-Indo-Iranian liturgy documented in the Gathas and the Rigveda, through the BMAC fire-temples, the Steppe pastoral religion of the Yamnaya and Andronovo, the shamanic substrate of the Ancient North Eurasians, and the ten-thousand-year Zagros Neolithic substrate of the Iranian plateau, to the convergence Zoroaster reformed rather than founded.
Read the series →A sourced examination of how sacred texts were composed late, dated backward, and dressed in borrowed authority — Daniel, Isaiah, the composite Torah, the pseudepigrapha — and of the Zoroastrian ideas that reshaped Western religion while their source went uncredited. Twenty case files, each naming its own limits and meeting the best counter-argument head-on, closing on the deception at the heart of the record and the debt never named.
Open the research file →Not critique but inheritance — the Zoroastrian tradition told in its own voice. Who Zarathustra was and the hymns we still have in his voice; asha and druj, the moral cosmos at its heart; the fire still burning after three thousand years and the keepers who tend it today; and Cyrus, the king who lived asha at the scale of an empire.
Read the series →A contemplative series turning the oldest truth-tradition toward the questions of the present: why a cosmology built on truth-against-distortion speaks to an age drowning in the counterfeit of the real; frashokereti and the shape of hope; the radical wager on free will; and druj as the perfect fake in an age of fabrication.
Read the series →Future series are being drafted — on the Yashts, on Nowruz, on the priesthood, on what Persia gave Greece.
Series are added when they're ready. The fire is patient.