Zoroastrianism

Zoroastrians often call their faith the Behdin, ‘the good religion’, and themselves Zartoshti or Behdinan. It begins with Zarathushtra, known to the Greeks as Zoroaster, a priest and poet whose seventeen hymns, the Gathas, survive in Old Avestan, an archaic language close to the oldest Sanskrit of the Vedas. When he lived is still argued over. Many scholars place him somewhere between about 1500 and 1000 BCE on linguistic grounds; others prefer a later date. Most agree that he lived in the east of the Iranian world, among a people who herded cattle and tended fire.

At the centre of his teaching is Ahura Mazda, the ‘Wise Lord’, creator of a good world. Against it works a hostile spirit, Angra Mainyu (later Ahriman). Every person stands between the two with the freedom to choose. Order and truth are asha; the lie and disorder are druj. The believer joins the side of asha through three simple commitments, recited daily: humata, hukhta, hvarshta, in Persian pendar-e nik, goftar-e nik, kerdar-e nik: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Around Ahura Mazda stand the Amesha Spentas, the ‘bounteous immortals’, each linked to part of creation, from fire and metal to water and plants.

Fire, thread and the year

Fire is not worshipped but faced in prayer, as the purest sign of Ahura Mazda’s light. In an atashkadeh, a fire temple, a priest (mobed) tends the flame with sandalwood and recites from the Avesta. The fire of the Atash Bahram in Yazd is, by community tradition, one that has burned without interruption for many centuries. At initiation, called sedreh-pushi in Iran and navjote among the Parsis of India, a child receives the white cotton sedreh and the woollen cord, the kusti, wound three times around the waist and retied through the day with prayers.

The calendar is full of feasts. Nowruz itself, at the spring equinox, belongs to the Zoroastrian year before it belonged to everyone. Six seasonal festivals, the gahambars, are kept with shared meals. Sadeh lights great bonfires in midwinter, Mehregan honours Mehr (Mithra) in autumn, and Tirgan in summer splashes water in memory of the archer Arash. Each June pilgrims climb to Pir-e Sabz, also called Chak Chak, a shrine in the cliffs near Ardakan where water drips from the rock, and to other mountain shrines around Yazd.

A long history

Zoroastrianism was the faith of the Sasanian state, and of much of Iran under the Achaemenids and Parthians in forms scholars still debate. After the Arab conquests of the seventh century it slowly became a minority faith. Groups left for Gujarat; the Parsis date their arrival in India to between the eighth and tenth centuries, a story told in the Qissa-i Sanjan. In Iran the community held on in Yazd and Kerman, and later grew in Tehran. The old practice of exposing the dead in towers of silence (dakhma) ended in Iran in the twentieth century; the towers outside Yazd now stand empty. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran recognises Zoroastrians as a religious minority with a reserved seat in parliament. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh tells of Zartosht’s coming at the court of King Goshtasp, and Zoroastrian names, festivals and stories run through Persian culture to this day, from Toronto to Mumbai.