Khordeh Avesta

The great liturgies of Zoroastrianism, the Yasna with its haoma ceremony, the Visperad, the Vendidad service, belong to trained priests in consecrated precincts. The Khordeh Avesta exists so that the rest of the community can pray, and its selection maps the devotional day of an observant Zoroastrian. The kusti prayers accompany the untying and retying of the sacred cord over the sedreh shirt, performed on waking, after ablutions and before prayer, the small rite that frames a Zoroastrian's whole day from initiation onward.

The five Gahs assign a short prayer to each watch of the day, dawn to midnight, each with its presiding spirits. The five Niyayesh litanies serve the recurring objects of reverence, the sun saluted three times daily, Mithra of the wide pastures, the moon, the waters and fire, the son of Ahura Mazda, honoured whenever one stands before a flame.

Around these cores gather the Afrinagan blessings recited at festivals and memorial days, the Sirozah formulas honouring the divinity of each of the thirty days of the month, and a selection of the Yashts, commonly including those to Ohrmazd, Ardwisur Anahid, Srosh, Mihr, Warharan and Ashtad, hymns whose full corpus belongs to the wider Avesta but whose favourites travel in the prayer book. The whole is portable religion, and the book's domestic ubiquity has made it, in practice, the scripture most Zoroastrians hold and use.

Zoroastrian tradition names Adurbad Mahraspandan, the celebrated high priest of Shapur II's reign in the fourth century CE, as the compiler of the little Avesta, the figure to whom the tradition also credits an ordeal by molten metal undergone to vindicate the faith and a body of surviving wisdom sayings. Scholarship treats the attribution as traditional rather than documented, and the book itself as a genre more than a fixed text: a devotional selection whose exact contents have always varied by community, era and printer, stabilised only locally by influential editions.

The Avestan texts it carries are transmitted with the same manuscript fidelity as the priestly corpus, but around them each edition arranges instructions, introductions and supplementary prayers in the vernaculars of the community, Middle Persian in the old manuscripts, later Persian, Gujarati in the Parsi editions of India, and English in the diaspora, together with the Pazand prayers composed in later ages.

Printed Khordeh Avestas multiplied from nineteenth-century Bombay onward, the editions with Gujarati transliteration and translation by scholar-priests such as Kavasji Kanga becoming household standards among Parsis, and community presses in Iran, India and the diaspora keep versions in circulation today. Its daily use continues wherever Zoroastrians live: the kusti retied, the sun saluted, the fire greeted, a canon of small recurring acts that has carried the world's oldest continuously practised revealed religion through profound dispersal.