ABSTRACT
Gore Vidal’s 1981 book Creation is possibly the best-known piece of historical fiction which discusses Zoroastrianism and its place within Achaemenid Persian History. Moreover, Vidal made much of his work as a ‘Persian History,’ which de-centres the Classical perspective; and as a “crash course in comparative religion,” which puts Zoroastrianism in dialogue with the other major religious and philosophical movements of the global fifth century BCE – pre-Socratic philosophy, Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. This chapter discusses Creation from a broad Zoroastrian/Iranian Studies perspective and considers the extent to which Vidal succeeds in his aims. Contextualising this work within a broader ‘Pushback for Persia’ in twentieth-century Anglophone literature, we see that Vidal goes further than his predecessors in placing his narrative in a more ‘Persian space,’ engaging with both Iranological scholarship and Old Iranian primary sources. However, due to his theoretical basis in Karl Jaspers’ The Origin and Goal of History (1953) and his own anti-Abrahamic ‘sky-god religions’ theory, Vidal presents Achaemenid-era Zoroastrianism/Mazdeism as an intolerant, monotheistic, and universalising religion, in the vein of early Christianity or Islam. Thus, although impressive in its scope, Creation ultimately fails in its aim to present a ‘Persian history’ and has far more to say about Vidal himself than Zoroastrianism.
