Entering the Good Religion

Navjote means new birth, and the ceremony marks the moment a Zoroastrian child is formally received into the community of the faithful and takes up the obligations of adult religious life. The rite is generally performed once between about seven and fifteen years of age, the exact custom varying between the Zoroastrian communities of Iran and the Parsi community of India, descendants of Zoroastrians who migrated from Iran centuries earlier and among whom the Gujarati term Navjote is most widely used alongside the Iranian Sedreh Pushi.

Before the ceremony the child undergoes a ritual bath, the nahn, understood as a purification preparing body and spirit for what follows. At the ceremony's centre a priest invests the child with the sedreh, a plain white cotton undershirt with a small symbolic pocket, and the kusti, a woven cord of seventy two threads knotted around the waist, both of which the initiate will wear for life and the kusti retied several times a day with prayer thereafter. Family and community gather for the occasion, which functions socially as much as religiously, marking the child's passage into a lifelong pattern of observance rather than closing any single chapter.