Vendidad

The Vendidad (properly Videvdat, "the law for keeping away the demons/daevas") is the Zoroastrian book of purity and ritual law, and it is unusual within the Avesta for surviving essentially complete. Cast largely as a dialogue in which Ahura Mazda answers the questions of Zarathushtra, it lays down the rules of ritual purity and the means of countering the pollution and the demonic forces that threaten the good creation, above all the pollution of death. It contains the tradition's elaborate law concerning corpses and their handling, the special ritual role of the dog, the penalties and purifications for contact with impurity, and, among its opening sections, the mythic geography of the lands Ahura Mazda created and the story of Yima (Jamshid) and the vara, the enclosure built to preserve life through a catastrophic winter. Later and more concerned with ritual detail than the Gathas, the Vendidad is recited whole in a night-long liturgy, and it is the principal source for the purity discipline that has always been central to Zoroastrian practice.

Unlike the Gathas, composed in an archaic Old Avestan close to the language of the Rig Veda, the Vendidad is written in Younger Avestan, a later and more accessible stage of the language, and its content points the same direction its grammar does: most specialists place its compilation considerably after Zarathushtra's own lifetime, plausibly as late as the Achaemenid or Parthian periods, centuries after the Gathas, even though the text presents itself as Zarathushtra's own dialogue with Ahura Mazda.

Nineteenth century European scholarship brought the Vendidad to a wide non-Zoroastrian readership for the first time; the French orientalist James Darmesteter's translation, published within Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East series, was for decades the standard English language route into a text most Western readers would otherwise never have encountered, though his interpretive framework, shaped by the comparative mythology of his era, has since been revised by later scholarship.

Within the Zoroastrian community itself, the Vendidad's role has narrowed over time relative to the Yasna: its detailed purity laws, especially those concerning corpse handling, remain doctrinally significant, but the demands of a night-long recitation and the practical difficulty of observing its rules in full outside historically Zoroastrian regions have made it read and studied more than it is ritually enacted in its entirety today.