Atar

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A fire of the highest grade is not lit. It is gathered. The priests who mean to enthrone one must first bring together sixteen separate fires, each from a different source and each meaning something by its source: fire from a baker’s oven and fire from a brewer’s, fire from a goldsmith and from a mint, from a potter’s kiln and a brick-maker’s, from the forge of an ironsmith and from a maker of arms, fire from the hearth of a herdsman and from the house of a Zoroastrian layman, fire from a ruler’s palace and from a dyer’s vat, fire struck from flint, and — hardest to come by and longest to purify — fire caught from a lightning strike and fire taken from a burning corpse. Each of the sixteen is carried apart and cleansed in its own rite, the flame passed from fuel to fuel until nothing of its first, defiled kindling remains. According to the community’s reckoning, the purifications repeated across all sixteen come to more than a thousand — the standard account gives 1,128 — and the whole labor, requiring some thirty-two priests, can run the better part of a year. Only then are the sixteen purified fires brought into one and enthroned, to burn from that day without extinction. What is being assembled is not merely a flame. It is the god.

The fire so gathered is Atar: the divine fire itself and the yazata, the “being worthy of worship,” who is that fire. In the settled theology he is a son of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, and the visible token on earth of the cosmic truth the tradition calls Asha. The faithful stand before him and turn through him toward the Lord who made the world. They do not bow to the flame as to an idol, and to call them “fire-worshippers” is to mistake the sign for the thing it signifies — an error as old as the outsiders who first coined the slur.

The name and how it reaches the record

The oldest thing about Atar is the word. Avestan ātar, in the nominative ātarš, means simply “fire”; it descends from an Indo-European root and stands as a distant cognate of Latin ater, “black” — the color a fire leaves behind. From ātar the later Iranian languages draw their own words for fire: Middle Persian ādur and ātaxš, and modern Persian ātaš. The name of the god and the name of the element are one word, and that identity is not loose usage but the heart of the matter. Atar is fire, and fire is Atar.

In the oldest layer of the tradition, however, fire is not yet a person. The Gathas — the seventeen hymns in Old Avestan that the tradition holds to be the very words of the prophet Zarathustra, and the earliest stratum of the whole Avesta — do not address Atar as a divinity to be petitioned. There fire is something the Wise Lord wields: a medium, an instrument, a faculty of judgment. Justice is administered through fire; the hymns speak of the ordeal by which the true is sorted from the false, and they speak of it in the language of heat and molten metal, of the “blazing” and “shining” test that reveals what a person is (the relevant Gathic verses are gathered by scholars at Yasna 30.7, 32.7, and 51.9, with the fire of judgment invoked again at Yasna 31.3, 34.4, and 43.4). Behind that imagery stands a real and ancient Iranian institution — the trial by heat, the ordeal in which a suspected liar was made to face fire or molten metal, and in which the flame, indifferent and pure, was trusted to know the difference between truth and the Lie. Atar is, from the first, the element that cannot be deceived.

How old that first is remains genuinely contested. The date of Zarathustra himself is one of the most disputed questions in the study of ancient Iran. A traditional reckoning, preserved in later Persian and Greek chronographies, would set him near the sixth century BCE; modern philology, weighing the archaic grammar of the Gathic hymns and their nearness to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda, places him instead deep in the second millennium, with the linguistic estimates clustering around 1500 to 1000 BCE. The fire-language of the Gathas belongs to that oldest stratum whenever it is dated — the ordeal by heat and the molten-metal test are among the archaic Indo-Iranian inheritances the hymns carry, older than any temple and older than the god’s own settled name.

The step from instrument to divinity is already visible in the oldest liturgy. Woven among the Gathas in the manuscripts is a short prose text, the Yasna Haptanghaiti, the “Worship of the Seven Chapters,” nearly as old as the hymns themselves. In it fire is invoked directly and given a title it would keep for the rest of the tradition’s history: ātarš ahurahe mazdå, the fire, the son of Ahura Mazda. This is among the earliest attestations of that relationship anywhere in the record. In the account of the standard scholarly authority, Mary Boyce’s article on fire in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the sonship is not a late poetic flourish but an old and load-bearing claim: the fire that burns on the hearth and the fire that flashes in the storm are, alike, the offspring and the presence of the Lord.

In the Younger Avesta and in the far later Pahlavi books — the great cosmological compendium called the Bundahishn among them — Atar has become a full yazata, worshiped in his own litany, the Atash Niyayesh, and honored in the calendar. The Zoroastrian day and month each carry a divine name, and the ninth of both is Adar, the fire’s own: the ninth day of the ninth month is doubly his, the feast of the flame. Throughout, Atar is bound inseparably to one of the Amesha Spentas, the Bounteous Immortals who surround Ahura Mazda. That one is Asha Vahishta, “Best Truth,” the Immortal of right order, and fire is his element and his ward. To look into the fire, in this frame, is to look at the visible face of Asha — the truth made light.

The fire that is a sign, and not an idol

Everything that follows from the identity of fire and truth turns on a distinction the community has had to defend for as long as it has had neighbors. The Zoroastrian does not worship fire. The Zoroastrian worships Ahura Mazda, and faces the fire while doing so, because the fire is the purest and most radiant sign in the created world of the Lord’s presence and of the order he upholds. The flame is a qibla, a direction of prayer, and a symbol; it is not the object of prayer. Where an outsider saw a people bowing to a burning thing and named them fire-worshippers, the tradition saw people turning, through the clearest medium creation offers, toward the one who is not seen at all. The correction is not a modern apology. It is intrinsic to the theology: an idol is a made thing mistaken for a god, and the whole force of the Wise Lord’s religion runs against exactly that mistake.

Fire is not undifferentiated. The tradition counts five kinds of it, enumerated at Yasna 17.11 and ranged in an ascending order of sanctity. Lowest is Berezi-savah, the “highly beneficent,” the fire that burns before the Lord in the temples and on the altars. Above it are Vohu-fryana, the fire that lives in the bodies of living things; Urvazishta, the fire hidden in plants and wood; and Vazishta, the fire of the lightning, the flame that leaps in the storm cloud. Highest of all is Spenishta, the “most bounteous,” the spiritual fire that burns in the presence of Ahura Mazda himself. The scheme runs from the visible hearth up to a light that no eye sees — a ladder of fire from the temple altar to the throne of God.

The graded fire of the temples answers, on the human side, to this graded fire of the cosmos. A Zoroastrian house of worship does not hold one kind of consecrated flame but one of three grades, and the difference between them is a difference of labor, of purity, and of standing. The lowest is the Atash Dadgah, the “fire of the appointed place” — a hearth-grade fire that a household or a local congregation may keep. It is consecrated quickly, in the space of a few hours, by two priests who recite between them the seventy-two verses of the Yasna liturgy, and when no ceremony is in progress a layperson may tend it. Above it stands the Atash Adaran, the “fire of fires,” a parish-grade flame gathered from the domestic hearths of representatives of the four old occupational estates — the priest, the warrior, the farmer, and the artisan — so that the working fires of a whole society are drawn up into one. Its consecration is a heavier matter, the work of about eight priests over two to three weeks.

Robed priests tend the fire in its metal vase (afrinagan) at a Parsi jashan, a ceremony of blessing. The fire is faced, fed, and kept pure as the sign of the truth; it is not an idol worshiped for itself. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

At the summit is the Atash Bahram, the “Victorious Fire” — often anglicized Atash Behram — whose name carries the Avestan Verethraghna, the divine power of victory: this is the fire of triumph over the Lie. It is the grade assembled from sixteen sources over the better part of a year, the one that is gathered rather than lit, and once enthroned it is meant never to be extinguished and never to be relit. The three grades together make a hierarchy of keeping: the higher the fire, the more of the world has gone into it, and the more absolute the obligation never to let it die.

The same fire that judges and sanctifies is also the instrument of the world’s end. In the doctrine of the Frashokereti, the final “making wonderful” when the cosmos is renewed and evil undone, the metal of the mountains is melted into a river of molten fire through which every soul that ever lived must pass. To the ashavan, the followers of truth, the river feels like warm milk; to those who chose the Lie it is what fire is to metal. In the tradition’s own telling the yazatas Airyaman and Atar are the powers who bring that river to flow — the healer and the fire, purifying the whole of creation at the last. Fire opens the ordeal in the Gathas and closes it at the end of time.

The keeping of the fires

The cult of Atar left its grandest mark under the Sasanians, the last great Iranian empire before Islam, which ruled from 224 to 651 and made the worship of Ahura Mazda the religion of its state. Sasanian kings endowed fire temples across the plateau and honored, above all the rest, three Great Fires — each an Atash Bahram of immemorial standing, and each bound by tradition to one of the three estates into which Zoroastrian society ordered itself. Adur Farnbag belonged to the priests and burned in Pars, the dynasty’s home province in the south. Adur Burzen-Mihr belonged to the farmers and herdsmen and burned in Parthia, in the northeast. And Adur Gushnasp — the “fire of the stallion” — belonged to the warriors, the estate of arms and horses and rule to which the ruling house itself belonged; it burned in Media, at a place the Arabs would later call Takht-e Soleyman.

Of the three, only one has been found and dug. Adur Farnbag and Adur Burzen-Mihr are known from the texts alone, their sites lost or disputed. But the warriors’ fire at Takht-e Soleyman has been recovered whole — its ruined temple standing beside a deep, spring-fed crater lake in what is now West Azerbaijan Province, where Sasanian kings are said to have journeyed on foot to the altar at their accession. The site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2003, the one place where the seals, the texts, and the stones of a Great Fire all agree.

Gold double dinar of Ardashir I (r. 224–240), founder of the Sasanian dynasty, struck at Ctesiphon. The obverse legend names him a Mazda-worshipper ‘whose seed is from the gods’; the reverse bears a fire altar with its flame, the emblem the Sasanian mints stamped on their coinage for four centuries. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.5.

The Arab conquest of the mid-seventh century ended the state’s patronage, and over the centuries that followed many of the old fires were let go out. The full story of that long attrition, and of the exile it drove, belongs to the communities who lived it. One portion of the faithful carried its fire by sea to Gujarat, on the west coast of India, and became the Parsis; the flame they kindled in their new country, called the Iranshah, “King of Iran,” was consecrated by tradition at Sanjan around 721 and, after later removals for safety, has burned since 1742 at Udvada, where it is held to be the oldest continuously tended Parsi fire. Those who stayed in Iran kept their own flame through the hard centuries and hold it today at Yazd, the one fire of the highest grade still alight in the land of its origin.

There are, in all the world now, only about nine fires of that highest grade. Eight of them burn in India — the Iranshah at Udvada, the fire at Navsari, four in Mumbai, and two at Surat — and the ninth is the fire of Yazd. Each is a fire that was gathered once and has not been relit since; the count of surviving Atash Bahrams is therefore also a tally of unbroken vigils, some of them centuries long. The communities that keep them — the Zoroastrians of Iran and the Parsis of India — are small now, and their numbers are falling and their people aging, a fact their own institutions record without consolation. But the keeping goes on. Somewhere at this hour a masked priest is laying sandalwood on a flame that a chain of priests before him has fed without a single break, guarding it from his own breath, so that the son of the Wise Lord and the visible sign of the truth may go on burning, as the tradition intends it to burn, until the river of fire runs at the end of the world.

→ Related: Verethragna · Sraosha · Fravashi · Haoma · Yazd Atash Behram · Udvada Atash Behram · Ka Ba Ye Zartosht · Pir E Naraki · The Zoroastrians · The Sasanians · Gathas