Fravashi

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Before there was a world to stand in, there was a decision. In the tradition’s own telling, Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, held the spirits of all the righteous who would ever live gathered close about him — unborn, unhurt, in the invisible and not-yet-embodied state the Pahlavi books call the menog. He showed them what was coming: the long war with Angra Mainyu, the Hostile Spirit; the wounds and the grief; the labor of a creation that evil had already resolved to spoil. And he set them a choice. They could remain with him, safe and bodiless and idle, sheltered from all of it. Or they could consent to be clothed in flesh and sent down into the material world to fight — to endure the Lie, and to help, in the end, to break it. They chose to be born. That consent, freely given before matter itself existed, is the first act of every fravashi.

A fravashi is the pre-existent, immortal spirit that belongs to each of the ashavan, the righteous. It is the higher self, the luminous pattern of a soul — the part of a person that existed before birth, endures after death, and is never touched by the Lie. It stands beside the living being it belongs to without being the same as that being’s soul, and it waits. What descends into the body to do the actual fighting is something else, sent out from the fravashi like a soldier from a garrison; the fravashi remains the eternal template to which that soldier will one day return. The powers of this world are held in place, the tradition says, partly by these waiting spirits — and the waiting is not passivity but the standing patience of what has already said yes.

The name and how it reaches the record

The oldest witness to the fravashis is a word whose meaning scholars have never settled. Avestan frauuaṣ̌i passes into Middle Persian as frawahr, fravahr, fravash, and fravaksh, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica traces the Old Persian antecedent to a reconstructed fravarti. From there the readings diverge. The most-cited derivation takes the root var-, “to choose” or “to profess a faith,” and reads the fravashi as “the one selected” — the spirit of confessional creed, the self elected for exaltation. A second reading takes a different var-, “to cover” or “to ward,” and makes the word a compound with the prefix fra-, yielding something like “protective valor” — the spirit as guardian and shield. A third takes yet another var-, “to make pregnant,” and reads a “birth-spirit,” the pattern that quickens new life. Each derivation lands on a real face of the fravashi as the later tradition knows it: the chooser, the protector, the giver of birth. None has driven out the others, and the etymology is honestly contested.

The principal scriptural witness is a single hymn. The Frawardin Yasht — Yasht 13, the thirteenth of the twenty-one hymns to the divine beings — is the longest of all the yashts, running to 158 stanzas, and, after the hymn to Ahura Mazda himself, among the most frequently recited; it is used in the funerary rites. It falls into two unequal halves. The first ninety-odd stanzas praise the fravashis in general — their number, their strength, their offices in holding the world firm — carried on a recurring refrain that propitiates the good, strong, bounteous fravashis of the righteous. The remainder is a roll of names, a litany of the fravashis of individual men and women bound to the faith, from the first mortals through the prophet and the heroes of the sacred past down to the great figures still to come at the end of time. That second half preserves more than four hundred personal names out of the old Iranian world, and for the philologist it is one of the richest onomastic quarries the Avesta offers.

The fravashis belong to a stratum of the tradition older than the surviving canon. The frame credits their veneration to the revelation of Zarathustra; the language of Yasht 13, like the archaic Avestan of the yashts generally, is read by scholarship as very old material — inherited, reshaped, and only much later fixed in writing, when the Avesta was codified under the Sasanian state church. Behind the cult, the Iranica article suggests, lies a still older fusion: an ancient and general belief in the surviving souls of the dead, blended at an early stage with the fravashis proper, the mighty spirits of warrior-heroes. What the redactors received was already a compound — the departed and the everlasting, folded into one class of being.

The pattern that chose to be born

Zoroastrian anthropology does not give a person one soul but several immaterial faculties, each with its own office. There is the urvan, the soul that is sent into the body to wage the moral war; the daena, the conscience or inner vision that a person makes over a lifetime and meets, at death, as a figure of their own deeds; the baodah, the faculty of perception; the ahu, the vital force; and, highest and first of them, the fravashi. The fravashi alone is pre-existent. It does not begin at conception and it does not end at the grave. In the settled account the fravashi sends the urvan out into the material world — into the getig, the world of matter, to fight the battle of good against evil — and keeps its own place in the deathless world, the eternal to which the temporal will answer.

Death, in this scheme, is a return more than an ending. When the body fails, the urvan lingers near it for three days and nights; on the dawn of the fourth day it sets out for the account it must render, crossing to the judgment of the soul where — as the tradition tells it — Sraosha, the heard divine word, keeps company with the weigher of deeds at the parting of the ways. What the urvan carries with it, gathered over a lifetime, it brings home to its fravashi, the pattern that sent it out. The everyday experience of one mortal life is folded back into the immortal self that never left the presence of the Lord. Nothing true is lost; the fravashi is the keeper of what the soul earned in the field.

Yet the fravashis are not private guardians tending single lives in a corner of the cosmos. The Frawardin Yasht makes them collaborators in the whole architecture of creation. Ahura Mazda is made to declare that it was through the glory and the might of the fravashis that he held up the wide earth and the encircling sky, that he keeps the waters flowing in their hidden channels and the plants rising from seed, that the sun and the moon and the stars keep to their courses. They hold the sky from falling and the earth from sinking; they guide the clouds to the ground that thirsts. And they attend the beginning of each new life: the fravashis are said to shape and sustain the child in the womb of the pregnant woman, developing its organs as it is knit together in the dark. The spirits that chose to be born preside, in turn, over every birth. Even the Wise Lord, the tradition holds, has his fravashi, and so do the Amesha Spentas, the Bounteous Immortals about him — a claim that seems paradoxical only until one sees what a fravashi is: not a lesser guardian but the eternal ideal of a being, the changeless pattern of which the living thing is the shadow. To possess a fravashi is to have an incorruptible self standing in the deathless world.

There is a martial cast to all this. The Frawardin Yasht does not describe the fravashis as a scatter of solitary angels but as a host — countless, arrayed, coming down to the aid of those who call on them like well-winged birds descending, standing guard over the whole of the good creation. They are invoked for victory in battle and for rain in drought, for the safe delivery of children and the keeping of herds. The individual fravashi that watches one life is a single soldier in an army that antedates the world, and the strength the yasht so insistently ascribes to them — good, strong, bounteous, again and again in the refrain — is the strength of a mustered force that has never once broken. When the tradition wants an image for how the material world is held together against the pull of the Lie, it reaches for these ranked spirits, bracing the sky and the earth from within like the beams of a house.

The choice made before creation is the theological hinge. The Pahlavi Bundahishn preserves the myth in full: Ahura Mazda showed the fravashis the future and the coming war, and offered them safety with him or descent into the body, and they rejected the shelter of doing nothing and consented to be embodied as active allies against Angra Mainyu. That consent makes the fravashi the very engine of Zoroastrian ethics. The tradition’s dualism is not a machinery that grinds without minds; it turns on free choice, on beings electing, again and again, to stand with Asha, the truth, against the Druj, the Lie. The fravashis made that election first, and made it for the hardest terms — not from safety but into danger, not once but as the ground of every righteous choice a mortal would afterward make. Their war has a horizon: the Frashokereti, the final renovation, when evil is spent and the world is made wholesome and undying. Each fravashi that chose incarnation is a small weight thrown, before time, onto that side of the scale. Their veneration is warm rather than fearful, and collective rather than idolatrous — the household honoring the fravashis of its own righteous dead in the same breath as the great fravashis of the prophet and the heroes named in the yasht. They are not worshiped as gods. They are kin who went ahead.

The winged disc that no one can read

The most famous afterlife of the fravashi is a picture whose meaning is lost. Carved into the stone of Persepolis, and hovering above Darius the Great in the great cliff-relief at Behistun, is a winged disc bearing the figure of a man — robed, crowned, one hand raised, a ring in the other, his lower body dissolving into the outspread feathers of a bird. The Achaemenids did not invent the shape. The winged disc was an old emblem of the ancient Near East, a form of the winged sun long used by the powers of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the Persian carvers adapted it, setting a human figure in the disc and putting it above their kings. For most of two and a half thousand years afterward it went almost unused. Then, in the twentieth century, it was revived — first by scholars, then by the Pahlavi state as a national emblem, and, after 1979, as a cultural badge worn by Iranians of every persuasion. Today it is everywhere, on pendants and shopfronts and tattoos, under the name faravahar, a word drawn from the Middle Persian frawahr and pinned to the emblem only long after its carvers were dust. The Achaemenids left no label for what they had cut.

The winged-disc-with-figure carved at Persepolis, the Achaemenid ceremonial capital. What its carvers meant by it is disputed: a fravashi, the royal glory (khvarenah), or Ahura Mazda are the three readings, and none can be proved. Photograph by Napishtim, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Because no ancient text explains it, the emblem has been claimed for three different things, and the argument is genuinely open. The Parsi scholar Jamshedji Maneckji Unvala, in articles of 1925 and 1930, read the winged figure as a fravashi — the guardian spirit hovering over the king, the reading that gave the modern symbol both its popular meaning and, eventually, its name. That identification was disputed almost at once. In 1928 Irach Jehangir Sorabji Taraporewala argued instead that the figure represents the khvarenah, the royal glory or divine fortune — the God-given radiance that legitimizes a king and shines over him in the reliefs. The khvarenah reading has since gathered the widest scholarly support, backed by A. Shapur Shahbazi and by Mary Boyce, who read the hovering figure on the monuments as the glory of kingship rather than a soul. A third view equates the figure with Ahura Mazda himself; most scholars reject it, since the Wise Lord in this tradition is held to be formless and imageless, and a portrait of him would be a contradiction in the theology’s own terms. What the record actually supports is a caution: no one can demonstrate what the first carvers intended, and every confident reading now on offer — including the fravashi one that named the modern emblem — is a modern reconstruction laid over an ancient silence.

The homecoming

The fravashis are, for all the antiquity of the debate, among the most tenderly living of Zoroastrian devotions, and the place they are most alive is not a monument but a house at the turn of the year. Each year at Fravardigan — the Parsis call it the Muktad, the panji, or in English the “All Souls” days — the fravashis of the departed are believed to return to their former homes. The observance falls in the last stretch of the old religious year: the closing days of the last month together with the intercalary Gatha days, ten days in all, culminating in Hamaspathmaedaya, the sixth and last of the seasonal feasts the tradition calls the gahambars, and ending before the dawn of Nowruz, the New Year. The whole first month of the year, and its nineteenth day — both bear the name Farvardin, from the fravashis themselves — belong to them too, and on those days the Frawardin Yasht is recited abundantly.

For the days of the homecoming the living make ready as if for guests, because that is what they are receiving. Homes and fire temples are scrupulously cleaned; a lamp is kindled to welcome the returning spirits and kept burning through the festival; fragrant flowers and consecrated food and burning wood and incense are set out for them; and the mobeds recite the names of the dead, so that the visiting fravashis, blessed and remembered by name, may in turn bless the house that remembers them. The exchange runs both ways and present-tense: the dead come home invisible among their families for a while, and the living, by cleaning and lamp and prayer, keep faith with them. The observance is described here at the distance of the public record — its inner rites belong to those who keep them.

The communities that keep the Muktad are small now, and aging: the Zoroastrians of Iran, in Yazd and Kerman and the villages around them, and the Parsis and Iranis of India, above all in Mumbai, where an extended eighteen-day form of the observance is also kept. Their numbers are counted in the tens of thousands where once they filled an empire, and the arithmetic is sober. Yet the rite has outlasted the empire that codified it and the monuments whose emblem is still argued over, and it asks nothing grand of those who keep it — only a clean room, a fed flame, and a name spoken aloud. The spirits who agreed, before the world was made, to be born into the war come back once a year to the houses that raised them, and are met at the door with light.

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