The Zoroastrians

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The cord is a thin thing, wound three times about the waist over a white cotton shirt, its ends knotted twice in front and twice behind. It is woven of seventy-two threads of lamb’s wool — one for each chapter of the Yasna, the central liturgy — and each morning the person wearing it unties it, holds it out, and ties it again while murmuring a prayer against the Lie. The gesture takes less than a minute. It is repeated at the watches of the day, before meals, before washing, before worship. Perhaps a hundred and twenty thousand people in the world still perform it, and by that small unbroken motion they keep a covenant older than any empire now standing: they are the Zoroastrians, the worshipers of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord.

Genealogy: heirs of the Wise Lord

The Zoroastrians are the living community of the religion revealed, in their own account, to the priest-poet Zarathushtra — Zoroaster to the Greeks, Zardusht to later Iran. They call their faith Mazdayasna, the worship of Mazda, and a member is a behdin, “one of the good religion.” At its center stands Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, the one wholly good creator who is uncreated and supreme. The teaching reaches the record through two channels that scholarship reads at different distances: the Avesta, the body of sacred texts in an Old Iranian tongue close kin to Vedic Sanskrit, at whose heart sit the Gathas, seventeen dense hymns in the prophet’s own archaic voice; and the Pahlavi books — the Bundahishn, the Denkard — redacted by priests in the ninth and tenth centuries CE, more than a millennium after the oldest layer of the hymns.

When Zarathustra himself lived is the single most contested question in the field, and the community’s own memory and modern philology give sharply different answers. A traditional reckoning, transmitted in late sources as “258 years before Alexander,” places him in the seventh or sixth century BCE, near the dawn of the Achaemenid Empire. The linguistic evidence points far deeper: the grammar of the Gathas stands so close to that of the Rigveda that most specialists now date their composition to somewhere between roughly 1500 and 1000 BCE, in the pastoral world of eastern Iran and southern Central Asia, with no cities and no writing in view. Mary Boyce, the most influential modern historian of the tradition, argued on those grounds for a date around 1700–1500 BCE. The homeland is less disputed than the date: the Avesta names the eastern regions, not the Persis of the later kings.

From that horizon the faith moved west and became imperial. The Achaemenid rulers (550–330 BCE) carved invocations of Auramazda into the cliff at Behistun; the Sasanians (224–651 CE) made the worship of Ohrmazd the state religion, organized a hierarchical church, and gathered the scattered oral Avesta toward a canon before the empire fell to the Arab-Muslim conquest around 651. What followed, for the community, were the long minority centuries. Two branches carried the tradition through them. In Iran the faith survived among a mostly rural minority in the desert cities of the central plateau, at Yazd and Kerman and, later, Tehran, keeping the cliff-shrine of Chak Chak and the old fires. And from about the eighth to the tenth century a band of Zoroastrians took ship for the western coast of India, where their descendants became the Parsis of Gujarat and Bombay. The two communities fell out of contact for so long that their calendars drifted a full month apart before nineteenth-century travel reunited them. The faith described here is the whole living body of Mazda-worshipers — Iranian and Parsi and diaspora together — whose memory is held by the priesthood, the mobeds and dasturs, and by the texts read critically against the archaeology and the modern scholarship of the Encyclopaedia Iranica.

The shape of the faith

Around Ahura Mazda stand the Amesha Spentas, the “Bounteous Immortals,” a heptad of holy powers: Vohu Manah, the Good Mind; Asha Vahishta, Best Truth or right order; Khshathra Vairya, Desirable Dominion; Spenta Armaiti, Holy Devotion; and the paired Haurvatat and Ameretat, Wholeness and Immortality, with the creative Spenta Mainyu, the Bounteous Spirit, sometimes counted among them as a seventh. In the Gathas these read less as separate gods than as facets of the one Lord and as qualities a person is meant to take into themselves — to think the good mind, to serve the truth. Each presides over one of the good creations: Asha Vahishta over fire, Spenta Armaiti over the earth, Haurvatat over the waters. Their exact status, whether hypostatized abstractions or older deities reordered by the prophet beneath the supreme God, is a matter scholars still weigh; the texts permit more than one reading. Below them are the yazatas, “those worthy of worship”: Mithra, the all-seeing judge of the covenant, who sees every broken oath; Anahita, goddess of the life-giving waters; and Atar, the divine fire itself.

The world these powers inhabit is ordered by a real ethical dualism. Against Asha, the truth, stands the Druj, the Lie; against the wholly good Lord stands Angra Mainyu, the hostile spirit — Ahriman in the later language — with the daevas, the demons who chose deceit. Whether that hostile principle is a near-coeternal counter-power or a derivative, a choosing-of-the-Lie that has no independent ground in the good creation, is genuinely debated, and the Sasanian-era current called Zurvanism pressed the question further by making Ohrmazd and Ahriman twin sons of Zurvan, Boundless Time — a speculation the priestly orthodoxy condemned. What the tradition holds without ambiguity is the human stake in the conflict. Men and women are endowed with free will and must choose, thought by thought and act by act, between the truth and the Lie; and the whole of creation is moving toward Frashokereti, the final “making wonderful,” when evil is at last undone, the dead are raised, and the world is restored to a perfection that can no longer be spoiled. It is, in the end, a universalist hope: every soul is meant to be saved.

The individual soul has its own passage through this scheme. Every righteous being possesses a fravashi, a pre-existent guardian-spirit or higher self, and the fravashis of the departed return each year in the last days of the calendar to be honored by the living — the dead kept present, not merely mourned. At death the soul lingers near the body for three days and is then led to the Chinvat bridge, the Bridge of the Separator, where it is judged by Mithra and his fellow watchers; there it meets the daena, the personified sum of its own deeds, radiant or hideous according to how it lived, and crosses to the House of Song or falls toward the House of the Lie until the final renovation makes all things whole. The tradition holds this out not as a threat but as the plain consequence of the daily choosing between the truth and the Lie.

Fire holds the visible center of the cult, and here the tradition has long been misread from outside. To call the Zoroastrians “fire-worshipers” mistakes the medium for its object. The fire — Atar — is venerated as the purest sign of Asha and of the divine light, the point toward which prayer is directed, not a god adored for itself; the faithful worship Ahura Mazda through the flame, keeping it pure, feeding it, facing it. The graded fires are tended in the fire temples, the highest grade being the Atash Behram, the “Victorious Fire.” Establishing one is an undertaking of nearly a year: sixteen kinds of fire are gathered — including, at the summit of difficulty, fire kindled by lightning, alongside the hearth-fires of many trades and of priest and layman — each purified many times over and at last enthroned, thereafter never allowed to go out. The Yazd Atash Behram enshrines a flame that tradition traces to about 470 CE, in the Sasanian period, and it is the only Atash Behram in Iran; the other eight burn in India, the senior among them the Iranshah carried into exile and installed at Udvada in 1742.

The faith is lived in the body and in the year before it is argued in the books. A child is brought into the community through the navjote — the Iranian sedreh-pushi — an initiation performed, in most practice, between about the ages of seven and fifteen, in which the child is invested for the first time with the sudreh, the sacred white shirt, and the kusti, the woolen cord of seventy-two threads. Thereafter the shirt is worn against the skin and the cord is untied and retied with prayer at the day’s set times, the small daily discipline with which this account began. The year, too, is kept around the fires. The six seasonal Gahambar festivals, each tied to one of the six primordial creations, together with Nowruz, the Persian New Year at the spring equinox around the twenty-first of March, make the seven feasts of obligation; the Encyclopaedia Iranica’s survey of Zoroastrian ritual sets these observances, with the daily prayers and the fire-tending, at the working core of the religion as it is actually practiced. The priesthood that maintains all this is hereditary and, in most communities, all-male, ranked from the herbad or ervad, the ordained assistant, through the mobed, who officiates at the congregational worship and the rites of life and death, to the dastur, the senior priest who administers a major temple. The liturgy is chanted in Avestan, a language its reciters no longer speak — a sacred tongue kept, like the fire, by unbroken transmission rather than by comprehension.

A mobed of the living Iranian community: Ardeshir Khorshidian, head of the Tehran Mobeds’ Association, photographed in 2020. The priesthood that tends the graded fires is hereditary and, in most practice, passes in the male line. — Fars Media Corporation (photo: Sadegh Nikgostar), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

The living community today

By every plain measure the Zoroastrians are now a small community, and on most estimates an aging and declining one, though the figures themselves are contested. A global total is commonly given as somewhere between about 110,000 and 200,000; a much-cited working study by the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America put the number, as of 2012, at roughly 111,000 to 122,000, with about half living in India and Iran. The largest concentrations, as the country-by-country tallies record, are in India, Iran, and North America. The demographic pressure is real and openly discussed within the community: deaths outrun births, marriage comes late or not at all, and the inherited rules of descent and the hereditary priesthood narrow the base from which the tradition can renew itself. These matters are debated with urgency; they are stated here as the community states them, soberly, and without prediction.

In Iran the community is one of the religious minorities recognized under Article 13 of the 1979 constitution — alongside Jews and Christians — and, under Article 64, it elects a single reserved representative to the Islamic Consultative Assembly. The official Iranian census of 2011 counted 25,271 Zoroastrians in the country, with the older heartland in Yazd province and further communities in Kerman and, now the largest single center, Tehran; before the 1979 revolution the Iranian population had exceeded fifty thousand, and post-revolutionary emigration has thinned it. That emigration has, in turn, built the diaspora. The Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America and comparable bodies now serve communities that include roughly fifteen thousand in the United States, some 7,285 recorded in the Canadian census of 2021, and on the order of 2,500 in Australia, with older settlements in Britain and East Africa. The reunion of these scattered communities with one another, and of the diaspora with Iran and with the Parsi center in India, is one of the features of contemporary Zoroastrian life; so is a running difference between the more permissive diaspora and the orthodox reluctance, at the Indian center, to accept converts or the children of women who marry outside the faith.

The community’s treatment of its dead is the practice that has drawn the most outside attention and stands, today, under the most strain. In the Zoroastrian frame a corpse is intensely impure, the seat of decay and the Lie, and must not be allowed to defile the good creations of fire, water, and earth. The traditional answer was excarnation: the body was carried to a dakhma, a raised circular tower open to the sky — the “tower of silence,” in the English phrase coined in the colonial period — and there exposed to the sun and the carrion birds until only bone remained, the elements left undefiled. The practice is best described at the distance of the public record, and its history is one of decline. In Iran the towers were largely given up in the early twentieth century in favor of burial in concrete-lined graves, which keep the body separated from the earth while meeting modern regulation. In India the method has been undone by an ecological catastrophe: from the early 1990s the subcontinent’s vulture populations collapsed by more than ninety-five percent, poisoned by a veterinary drug in cattle carcasses, leaving too few birds to perform the old office — and the community has since debated solar concentrators, captive-breeding programs, and, in some cases, burial or cremation. It is a genuine and painful question inside the tradition, recorded here as such and no further.

What continues, undiminished, is the life of the fires and the year. The ever-burning temple of Yazd and the cliff-shrine of Chak Chak still draw pilgrims; the royal fire-lake of Takht-e Soleyman, where a Sasanian fire once burned beside a crater lake, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2003; the Iranshah at Udvada remains the destination of the Parsi faithful. The Gahambars are kept, and Nowruz is kept, as they have been kept for a very long time. A tradition that once crowned emperors now numbers, worldwide, fewer people than a mid-sized town, and it endures on the same discipline it always ran on: a fire fed and never let die, a shirt of white cotton, and a woolen cord of seventy-two threads untied and tied again each morning, against the Lie, in the name of the Wise Lord.

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