Mazdakism

Mazdakism was a religious and social movement in Sasanian Iran, an offshoot of Zoroastrianism founded and led by the priest and reformer Mazdak in the late fifth and early sixth centuries CE, separately live in this atlas as the historical figure Mazdak. It combined Zoroastrian dualist cosmology, in which light and darkness contend for the world, with radical egalitarian social teaching that called for the communal sharing of property and, controversially in later hostile accounts, of women, aiming to reduce the envy and strife the movement held responsible for the triumph of darkness over light. Mazdak gained the support of the Sasanian king Kavad I for a period before the movement was violently suppressed under Kavad's successor Khosrow I. Mazdakism is recorded here as the movement and religious tradition itself, distinct from Mazdak the historical figure who founded it, so that a person revered within Mazdakism is correctly linked to the tradition rather than to its founder.