Zoroastrianism

Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, is uncreated, wholly good, and the source of everything good. Ranged against him is Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirit, who is not his creation, not his equal, and destined to lose. This is what makes the tradition hard to classify. It is monotheist in that only one being is worshipped and only one is the origin of creation, and dualist in that evil is a genuinely independent principle rather than a shadow of the good or a test permitted by it. Zoroastrians generally describe their faith as monotheist; scholars have argued the point for two centuries without settling it.

Around Ahura Mazda stand the Amesha Spentas, six beneficent immortals who are at once aspects of him and guardians of parts of creation: good purpose, best order, desirable dominion, holy devotion, wholeness and immortality, attached respectively to cattle, fire, metals, earth, water and plants. The scheme means that treating the physical world well is not incidental to the religion but is the religion, since the elements are the bodies of divine beings.

Human beings matter to the outcome. Creation is a battlefield the hostile spirit invaded, and each person, through good thoughts, good words and good deeds, the formula that recurs throughout the liturgy, either strengthens or weakens the order Ahura Mazda established. Asceticism has no standing here. Marriage, children, agriculture and honest work are religious acts, and deliberate self-denial is closer to a fault than a virtue.

The end is not a rescue of souls from a doomed world but the repair of the world itself. Frashokereti, the making wonderful, is the final renovation in which evil is destroyed, the dead are raised in their bodies, and creation is restored to the perfection it was made with. A saviour figure, the Saoshyant, presides over it. What survives is this world, purified, not an alternative to it.

A late current known as Zurvanism made Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu twin offspring of Zurvan, infinite time, which resolved the dualism by subordinating both. It is attested largely in foreign and hostile reports, and it left no living successor.

Fire is the visible focus of Zoroastrian worship and the most misunderstood part of it. It is honoured as the purest of the created elements and as a sign of the divine presence, and prayer is offered in its direction, not to it. Temple fires are graded. An Atash Behram, the highest grade, is consecrated over roughly a year from sixteen separate sources of fire, including one gathered from lightning, and once installed is tended continuously; only a handful exist, mostly in Gujarat and Mumbai. Lesser grades serve ordinary congregations. Priests approach the fire masked, so that breath does not pollute it.

Purity law runs through daily life. Fire, water, earth and air must not be defiled, and the most polluting substance is a corpse. This produced the practice of exposure: the dead are laid on a raised stone structure, a dakhma or tower of silence, where birds strip the bones, so that neither burial nor cremation contaminates earth or fire. The practice has become hard to sustain. Vulture populations across South Asia collapsed in the 1990s after the veterinary drug diclofenac entered the food chain, and Parsi opinion has been divided ever since over solar concentrators, captive aviaries, and whether burial or cremation may be permitted. In most of the diaspora exposure is not an option and burial is normal.

Initiation is the navjote in India and sedreh-pushi in Iran, usually somewhere between seven and fifteen, at which the child receives the sudreh, a white undershirt, and the kusti, a cord of seventy-two threads tied at the waist and untied and retied with prayer several times a day. The Yasna, the principal liturgy, is recited by priests over consecrated implements and includes the preparation of haoma, a pressed plant drink cognate with the Vedic soma.

The most divisive question in the living community is not doctrine but membership. Many Parsi authorities in India accept no converts and do not recognise the children of Parsi women who marry outside the community, while Iranian and North American bodies are often more permissive. Given the demographic decline, that argument is existential rather than academic.

Zoroastrianism is routinely credited with supplying Judaism, and through it Christianity and Islam, with a package of ideas: a named adversary of God, ranks of angels and demons, bodily resurrection, a judgement after death, a saviour at the end of history, and a renewed world. The Jewish material that most resembles this appears after the Achaemenid period, when Judaea was under Persian rule and Jewish communities were living in Iran, so the opportunity for contact is not in doubt.

What is in doubt is the direction and the proof. The Zoroastrian texts that set the scheme out most fully, the Bundahishn and other Pahlavi works, were written down in the Islamic period, many centuries after the Jewish texts they are said to have influenced. The Avesta itself was transmitted orally for a very long time before being written, so its contents cannot be dated the way a manuscript can. Scholars who argue for influence reply that Iranian oral transmission was conservative and that the Gathas already contain the essentials. Scholars who resist it answer that arguing from an undated source to a dated one inverts the normal method, and that comparable ideas developed inside Second Temple Judaism for reasons of its own.

Both positions are held by serious specialists in the field, and the disagreement will not be settled by argument alone. It would take datable Iranian evidence from the relevant centuries, which does not at present exist. The honest statement is that the resemblance is real, the contact is real, and the dependence is unproven in either direction.

A separate and better evidenced line of transmission runs the other way. Greek and Roman writers turned Zoroaster into a legendary sage and attached astrological and magical writings to his name that have nothing to do with Iranian religion. The Latin magus, from the Iranian priestly title, entered European languages carrying that freight, and the magi of the Christmas narrative are a trace of the same reputation. Much of what Europe long believed about Zoroastrianism came from this literature rather than from Zoroastrians, and the Avesta became available in Europe only after Anquetil-Duperron travelled to India in the 1750s to obtain it.