The Magicians of Mazda by Ashwin Sanghi (Book Review)

 🪔 Why should history always suit the Victor's narrative?

🪔 Is burning books the same as killing people? 

🍀 You never know what awaits on the other side of the door. I never knew this would be on this side of the door. I just couldn't think I'd love this book so much! So many lines, so many paragraphs, so many pages. I went through them again and again.

🍀 Blurb : Parsi scientist Jim Dastoor gets abducted from his Seattle laboratory and whisked away to Tehran, when he tries to free his wife from the kidnappers. The Ayatollah believes Jim is the key to uncovering the ancient relic known as the Athravan Star, and his men will do anything to possess it, even murder.

🍀 Why is everyone after this Athravan Star? Because they think it can save humanity from all the diseases.

🍀 From the ancient ruins of Persepolis to the Taliban camps of Afghanistan, from the womb of an Udvada fire temple to the icy mountains of Kashmir, from the dreadful coffin cells of Tehran to the deathly calm of Diu's Tower of Silence, Jim and his historian wife, Linda, are sucked into a terrifying chase across vividly changing landscapes.

🍀 Deftly navigating between time and geography, The Magicians of Mazda travels backwards, through the epochs of Islamic jihad, Macedonian revenge, Achaemenid glory, messianic birth, Aryan schism-to the Vedic fount from where it all began.

Review : 

🍀 This book contains such strong emotions that they can't be expressed here. The mystery it contains will not let you leave the book. As I read The Krishna Key a few days back, I started to understand the storyline of Ashwin Sanghi's books. There are so many things going on in the story. Whenever you get calm with the story, thinking now it'll be like this, something else will happen. The beauty of his words, the knowledge he shares with his books, the research he does for his books, is just amazing. The narration of the story, the characters so well defined, the language so easily understandable. There were two grammatical mistakes which could be corrected in the next print of the book. There is nothing written or mentioned by chance; each and everything has a reason for being there. This book was such a good read. I'd definitely recommend this one to everyone. You do need to read this book. It'll give you such extraordinary knowledge of history and religion. I want to tell you much more about this book, but I don't want to tell you everything here.

🍀 Zoroastrianism : a mysterious religion as irresistible as a magnet. Once you have touched it, there is no turning back.

🍀 There is so much to know about them. What happened to them? Where have they been? How did/do they live?

🍀 Parsis are the descendants of Zoroastrians from Iran who formed a settlement in India - Gujarat, around 720 CE. Is it so? Or is there some other theory as well?

🍀 While Hindus cremate their dead and Muslims and Christians bury them, Zoroastrians practise skyburials. For this, they require special towers called dakhmas.

🍀 What is Atash Behram? Have you heard of it? Atash Behram is the highest form of fire that could be placed in a Zoroastrian temple. What kind of fire is that? What's the highest form of it?

🍀 What is Zarathustra? Have you ever heard of it? In old Persian, the word Zara means gold, which is how, in India, gold-embroidery came to be known as "zari". And thustra implies a binary star.

🍀 Have you heard of Persepolis city? What happened to it?

🍀 Why did Zoroastrians need to run away from Iran to India? What made them run away from their own home? What kind of things were done to them? How did they lose the number of people?

🍀 How did the gigantic knowledge & culture of Zoroastrians get wiped out from this world? 

🍀 Have you heard of the Battle of Jelovala? Jelovala means "covered". The reason for choosing this name is that eventually 100,000 bodies of the dead covered the desert. Over 130,000 women and children were enslaved and sold in the markets of Mecca and Medina.

🍀 If someone wanted to wipe out a culture and religion, what kind of things did they do at that time?

There are some lines from the book that I liked the most :

🍀 Sometimes we must do things, we don't want to, to protect ourselves.

🍀 Sometimes the ends are more important than the means.

🍀 The only certainty in life is death.

🍀 There are two traps to avoid in life. One - Caring what they think. Two - Thinking that they care.