Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Zoroastrianism Hymns gathers three of the atlas's Zoroastrian hymns, two Gathas held to be the words of Zarathushtra himself and one Yasht addressed to an older Indo Iranian divinity absorbed into the later tradition.

The Ahunavaiti Gatha is the first of the five Gathas and the oldest layer of the Avesta, addressed to Ahura Mazda in an archaic language closely related to Vedic Sanskrit; it is argumentative rather than narrative, asking questions and setting out the choice between truth and the lie as the structure of existence, and it is recited daily by priests in the Yasna ceremony. The Ushtavaiti Gatha is the second of the five, sixty six stanzas across four songs, considered by many scholars the most poetically accomplished, built largely from Zarathushtra's own questions to Ahura Mazda that the text leaves unanswered, a formal feature distinguishing it from the more instructional Ahunavaiti.

The Mihr Yasht stands apart from both. It belongs to the Yashts, hymns to individual divinities rather than to the Gathic core, and it is addressed to Mithra, god of the contract, described watching whether an agreement is kept from a chariot with a thousand ears and ten thousand eyes. It preserves Indo Iranian material older than Zoroaster's reform, absorbed rather than discarded, and its relationship to the later Roman cult of Mithras remains contested rather than demonstrated. Together the three hymns span the tradition's oldest textual core and the material that core absorbed rather than replaced.