The Atash Behram is the highest grade of Zoroastrian fire, and what makes it so is a consecration of extraordinary elaborateness.
Three grades
Zoroastrian temple fires are ranked:
- Atash Dadgah, the lowest, which may be tended by laypeople.
- Atash Adaran, consecrated from fires of four occupational groups.
- Atash Behram, the highest, the "fire of victory".
There are nine Atash Behrams in the world. Eight are in India; this is the only one in Iran.
The consecration
An Atash Behram is gathered from sixteen separate sources of fire, each purified before being combined.
The sources are specified by type and include fire from a blacksmith, a baker, a brick-maker, a goldsmith, a potter, from a corpse-burning, the most polluted of all, requiring the most purification, and, most demandingly, fire from lightning, which cannot be arranged and must be waited for.
Each source undergoes a long purification, in which fire is drawn from fire repeatedly, by one account, over a thousand purifications in total. The process takes a year or more, and requires a large number of priests.
The completed fire is then enthroned, and thereafter is never allowed to go out.
Tending
Priests feed the fire at set times through the day, wearing the padan, a white cloth mask over nose and mouth, so that breath and saliva cannot reach it.
Fire is not worshipped as a god. It is the purest of creations and the visible representation of Ahura Mazda's presence and of truth, and Zoroastrians pray towards it rather than to it. The distinction has been misdescribed for two and a half thousand years and Zoroastrians still correct it.
Access
Only Zoroastrians may enter the sanctum. Others view the fire through a glass screen from the room outside.
The Anjuman-i Nasiri, the local Zoroastrian association, opened the temple to visitors in this way from the 1960s, a deliberate decision by the community to be seen, which makes Yazd markedly more accessible than the Indian Atash Behrams, where non-Parsis are excluded from the precinct entirely.
Continuity, and what can be verified
The community holds that this fire was first kindled around 470, and has been moved from site to site ever since: centuries at Aqda, then at Ardakan, then installed in the present building in 1934.
That is the tradition's account of its own continuity and cannot be independently verified across fifteen centuries and several relocations. It should be read as what the community maintains, and it is a claim of exactly the kind this atlas records as evidence of what a tradition holds rather than as established fact.
The building itself is documented: put up in 1934 with money raised by the Parsi Zoroastrians of India.
That detail is worth keeping. The diaspora paid for the homeland's principal temple, a fair summary of where the wealth of the religion has sat since the nineteenth century.