The Visperad's natural home in the Zoroastrian year is the gahanbars, the six seasonal festivals that punctuate the calendar from midspring to the eve of the new year, each traditionally honouring one of the six creations, sky, water, earth, plants, cattle and humankind. On these days the community's worship is at its most solemn, and the Visperad service, the Yasna extended with the invocations of all the lords, is the liturgy the priesthood performs for the festival. The pairing is ancient and apt: festivals that celebrate the orders of creation are served by the liturgy that names the lord of every order.
In practice the gahanbar is also the great occasion of communal charity and shared food, the myazd feast, so the high liturgy inside the fire temple and the common meal outside it form one observance, worship and community sustaining each other. The texts of the Visperad were translated by L. H. Mills in the Sacred Books of the East alongside the Yasna and the Gah prayers, making the service one of the earliest fully accessible Zoroastrian liturgies in European scholarship, and the philological work since has confirmed how conservative the priestly transmission was: the recited text preserves Avestan of great antiquity, memorised and performed for well over two millennia. Among the Parsis of India and the Zoroastrians of Iran the full solemn performance has grown rarer with the priesthood's decline, a loss the community itself documents, but the service remains in the living repertoire of the trained priesthood and is still celebrated for the festivals it was made for.