Robert Charles Zaehner

Robert Charles Zaehner (1913–1974) was a British academic who specialised in Eastern religions. Earlier he had served as an intelligence officer in Iran. While a professor at Oxford University, he wrote on the Zoroastrian religion, on mystical experience (articulating a typology), on the Hindu religion, and on comparative religion generally. His last several books addressed similar issues in popular culture. He published under the name R. C. Zaehner.

Born on 8 April 1913 in Sevenoaks, Kent, he was the son of Swiss German immigrants to England. Zaehner "was bilingual in French and English from early childhood. He remained a excellent linguist all his life." Educated at the nearby Tonbridge School, he was admitted to Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied Greek and Latin, and also ancient Persian including Avestan, gaining first class honours in Oriental Languages. During 1936–37 he studied Pahlavi, another ancient Iranian language, with Sir Harold Bailey at Cambridge University. Zaehner thereafter held Prof. Bailey in high esteem. He then began work on his book Zurvan, a Zoroastrian Dilemma, a study of the pre-Islamic religion of Iran.

Zaehner enjoyed "a prodigious gift for languages". He later acquired a reading knowledge of Sanskrit (for Hindu scriptures), Pali (for Buddhist), and Arabic (for Islamic). In 1939 he taught as a research lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. About this time, after reading the French poet Rimbaud, and in Rumi the Sufi poet of Iran, as well as study of the Hindu Upanishads, Zaehner came to adopt a personal brand of "nature mysticism". Yet his spiritual progression led him in the mid-1940s to convert to Christianity, becoming a Roman Catholic while stationed in Iran.

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