This chapter presents the Iranian outlook and its religious foundations. The Avestan material, although presented in a Zoroastrian redaction, preserves many of the Iranian beliefs which were inherited from remote antiquity and persisted in Iran throughout the Sasanian period. The Indo-Iranian people believed in a number of gods, mostly symbolizing aspects of nature, as well as over man's destiny. Cult gods were another order of divine beings venerated by the Indo-Iranians. The Indo-Iranians believed not only in beneficent gods and spirits but in a number of hostile supernatural beings and malignant spirits. In Zoroastrian teachings the demons and other malicious creatures - all followers of Drug, 'Falsehood', became ever more sharply contrasted with divine beings and acted desperately against the men. In pagan antiquity various myths about the creation of the world and the nature of the universe evidently existed, as their traces can be found in both the Vedas and the Avesta, as well as in the.