Zurvanism was a fatalistic religious movement of Zoroastrianism is the last text in Middle Persian that provides any evidence of the cult of Zurvan. The 13th century Zoroastrian Ulema-i Islam ([Response] to Doctors of Islam), a New Persian apologetic text, is unambiguously Zurvanite and is also the last direct evidence of Zurvan as a First Principle.
There is no hint of any worship of Zurvan in any of the texts of the Avesta, even though the texts (as they exist today) are the result of a Sasanian-era redaction. Robert Charles Zaehner proposed that this is because the individual Sasanian monarchs were not always Zurvanite and that Mazdean Zoroastrianism just happened to have the upper hand during the short but crucial period that the canon was finally written down.
Types of Zurvanism
According to Zaehner, the doctrine of the cult of Zurvan appears to have three schools of thought, each to a different degree influenced by alien philosophies, which he calls
- materialist Zurvanism,
- ascetic Zurvanism, and
- fatalistic Zurvanism.
These are described in the following subsections. Zaehner proposes that each of three arose out of the classical Zurvanism. 312)]]
In his first manuscript of his book Zurvan, Zaehner identified the leontocephalic deity of the Roman Mithraic Mysteries as a representation of Zurvan. Zaehner later acknowledged this mis-identification as a "positive mistake",</blockquote>
The legacy of Zurvanism
No evidence of distinctly Zurvanite rituals or practices have been discovered, so followers of the cult are widely believed to have had the same rituals and practices as Mazdean Zoroastrians did. This is understandable, inasmuch as the Zurvanite doctrine of a monist First Principle did not preclude the worship of Ohrmuzd as the Creator (of the good creation). Similarly, no explicitly Zurvanite elements appear to have survived in modern Zoroastrianism.