This article examines seemingly monotheistic, polytheistic and dualistic features of Zoroastrianism from the point of view of the Zoroastrian creation myth. Exploring the personality of the principal deity, Ahura Mazdā, the origin of the spiritual and material worlds and the worship of the Yazatas, it is argued that Zoroastrianism has its own particular form of monotheism.

This article argues that the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti constituted the kernel of a ritual text recited during the Yasna ceremony. Zaraθušhtra's Gathas were arranged around it, and so were the holy prayers and later additions in Younger Avestan. The arrangement of the extant Older Avesta is probably the original one, and may go back to the composer himself. Its compositional principle is that of parallelism and ring composition, a pattern which can be found both in individual Gathic hymns, two of which (Y 28 and 43) are analysed, and in the structure of the entire Yasna.

Exchange and reciprocity are central concepts in all forms of human society. Based on a system of mutual obligation, they denote any activity in which valuables are circulated between individuals or groups of people. In the religious sphere they include the transfer of both material and immaterial goods between human and spiritual beings. As outlined by Marcel Mauss in his Essai sur le don, the classic work on the total system of reciprocity, such exchange is governed by the principle of the gift entailing the counter-gift.