Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish (December 19, 1856 – February 29, 1936) was the founder of the religious movement known as Mazdaznan. He was born Ernst Otto Haenisch, a German immigrant from Poznań (then Posen),[1] son of the grocer (victualer) Heinrich Ernst Haenisch and his wife Anna Dorothea nee Schmidt. He was baptized on December 28, 1856.
He adopted the name Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha'nish in 1902, and his European follower David Ammann claimed that he was born in 1844 to a Russian diplomat in Tehran and to have been sent as a child to a secret society of Zoroastrians in the mountains of Iran due to his serious congenital heart defect, where he was trained to master his hypoxic condition with control of breathing.
- ^ Ev. St. Petri Church in Posen, Kirchen-Register der Gebornen und Getauften im Jahre 1800 sechs und fünfzig, Seite 253 Nr. 156; researched on May 2020 by http://My-Ancestors.eu