Vendidad Service

Zoroastrianism assigns its worship to watches of the day, and one liturgy alone belongs to the deep night. The Vendidad Service begins in the Ushahin gah, after midnight, and continues toward dawn: the two priests, purified and installed in the ritual precinct, perform the Yasna enlarged by the Visperad, and into that already extended service they recite, at fixed stations, the twenty-two chapters of the Vendidad, the law against the demons. The choice of hour is doctrine enacted.

The night belongs, in Zoroastrian cosmology, to the assault of the polluting powers, and the recitation of the law that names, contains and repels them is set precisely where the danger is greatest, so that the priests keep watch for the community with the most powerful instrument the tradition owns, the sacred word itself. The service is physically formidable: six hours and more of continuous Avestan recitation from memory and book, sustained by two men, with the ritual actions of the Yasna proceeding beneath the added text. It has traditionally been performed for the protection of the living, for the souls of the departed, and at seasons when the community's need is great. Because of its length and the strictness of the required priestly purity, the full Vendidad Service has become rare, and its decline is one of the most discussed losses within the contemporary Parsi priesthood; where it is still performed, it remains what it always was, the heaviest single act of Zoroastrian worship.

The text at the centre of this service is an oddity among the world's liturgical books: not a hymnal or a prayer collection but a legal code. The Videvdad, the law against the daevas, is cast as a dialogue in which Zarathushtra asks and Ahura Mazda answers, and its chapters legislate the great Zoroastrian concerns of purity: the treatment of the dead, the contagion of corpse pollution, the offences against water, earth and fire, the penalties and the means of purification, including the elaborate nine-night cleansing. Around this code stand chapters of myth, the story of Yima and his underground refuge against the world-winter, the catalogue of the sixteen lands created good and counter-created with plagues, material that has made the book a primary source for Iranian legend as well as law. That such a text is recited entire as a liturgy says something essential about Zoroastrian ritual theology: the sacred word is operative, and reciting the law against pollution is itself an act against pollution, not a reading about one.

Philologists note that the Vendidad's Avestan is later and rougher than the Gathic hymns, the work of a priesthood composing in a partly remembered sacred language, and that it is the only major Avestan book to survive complete, precisely because its ritual use kept every chapter in living transmission. The scriptural text itself is treated in the atlas among the Avestan books; the service described here is its performance, the point where the law book becomes an act.