Zoroastrianism

• 1. Introduction

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  Zoroastrianism has an estimated 110,000-120,000 followers today, yet it once counted its believers in the millions. Scholars rank it among the oldest organized faiths in the world. Its founder is usually called Zoroaster, a Greek rendering of the Iranian name Zarathushtra Spitama. Followers call the religion Mazdayasna. An older word, Behdin, means "of the good religion."

  At its heart, the faith pictures the universe as a contest between a wise, benevolent creator and a spirit bent on destruction. In that picture, ordinary people are not spectators. Their choices help decide how the contest goes.

  Zoroaster himself raises the first of four questions that run through this story. How much can anyone really know about him? Why do scholars still argue over whether the religion teaches one god, two gods or many? How did a faith that once backed great empires shrink so far? And what kept it alive in the places where it survived?

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• 2. Light and Darkness

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  Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, sits at the head of Zoroastrian belief as an uncreated and all-good creator. The name joins two Avestan words, ahura for lord and mazda for wisdom. In most of the Gathas, Zoroaster keeps the two ideas separate, though he sometimes merges them. He also declares Ahura Mazda all-knowing but not all-powerful. Seven divine beings called the Amesha Spenta serve him as guardians of different parts of creation. Countless lesser divinities, the yazatas, whose name means "worthy of worship," assist as well.

  Facing him is Angra Mainyu, later called Ahriman, the destructive spirit. Ahura Mazda dwells in light and goodness above, while Angra Mainyu dwells in darkness and ignorance below. They have existed independently for all time. Angra Mainyu is no creation of the good god, and his aim is to tempt humans away from Ahura Mazda.

  Angra Mainyu answered with demons, evil daevas and noxious creatures such as snakes, ants and flies. He made an evil counterpart for every good being, with one exception. Humans, he found, he could not match. He then broke in through the base of the sky and brought suffering and death to Gayomard and the bull. The evil forces were trapped inside the universe and could not retreat.

  Mah, the Moon, protected the seed released by the dying man and bull. From the bull's seed grew every beneficial plant and animal. From the man's seed grew a plant whose leaves became the first human couple. The assault also remade the land. A world that had been flat, peaceful and lit every day became mountainous, violent and half night.

  Zoroastrian cosmography divides the cosmos into heaven and earth. Heaven has three parts. The lowest holds the fixed stars, the middle holds the domain of the moon, and the upper part belongs to the sun and lies beyond Ahriman's reach. On earth, the greatest of three mountains, Harā Bərəz, stands at the center and heads a chain of 2,244 mountains encircling the world.

  Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn appear nowhere in early Zoroastrian sources. In the Middle Persian period they entered the tradition as demonized bodies. They were named Anāhīd for Venus, Tīr for Mercury, Wahrām for Mars, Ohrmazd for Jupiter and Kēwān for Saturn. Jupiter thus carried the name of the good god himself.

  A final struggle of 3,000 years, according to ancient Zoroastrian teaching, ends with one last assault by evil. The sun and moon darken, people lose their reverence for religion, family and elders, and the world falls into winter. Azi Dahaka, Angra Mainyu's most fearsome miscreation, breaks free to terrorize the earth. The Saoshyant, the final savior, is born in legend to a virgin who is impregnated by Zoroaster's seed while bathing in a lake.

  The Saoshyant raises the dead from every afterworld for a last judgment. All then wade through a river of molten metal. The righteous do not burn, and the impure are fully purified. Evil ends up powerless but not destroyed. Reality undergoes a renovation called Frashokereti, and limited time comes to an end. Even souls that descended into darkness are reunited with Ahura Mazda in the Kshatra Vairya, meaning "best dominion." They are resurrected to immortality. Humanity needs two judgments, since people have both a spiritual side and a physical side.

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• 3. Choice and Judgment

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  Asha, a word for truth and cosmic order, flows from Ahura Mazda, while druj, meaning falsehood and disorder, flows from Angra Mainyu. To the ancient Indo-Iranians, asha was the course of everything observable. It covered the motion of the planets, the progression of the seasons, and the daily rhythm of nomadic herdsmen set by sunrise and sunset. Truth-telling and the Threefold Path strengthened it. Druj shows itself as greed, wrath and envy.

  Druj is not quite the Western idea of evil. It is more systemic and less personal. It stands for chaos against order, decay against creation, or simply the lie against truth. Ahura Mazda did not make it. Druj is "nothing," anti-creation, and it arose as the antithesis of existence through choice.

  Humata, hukhta and huvarshta, meaning good thoughts, good words and good deeds, make up the Threefold Path of Asha. Modern practitioners treat it as the core maxim of the religion. Goodness is to be pursued for its own sake, not for reward. Charity and the spreading of happiness matter, and men and women share spiritual equality and duty. Zoroaster stresses deeds within society, so extreme asceticism is frowned upon, though moderate forms are allowed.

  Absolute free will is central to Zoroastrian teaching, and predestination is rejected. Even divine beings can choose. People bear responsibility for their situations and for how they treat one another, so reward, punishment, happiness and grief all depend on how they live. Life is a temporary state in which each mortal is expected to join the continuing battle between Asha and Druj. The ultimate aim is to become an ashavan, a master of Asha.

  Before a child is born, its soul, the urvan, is united with its fravashi, a higher spirit that has existed since Ahura Mazda created the universe. During life the fravashi inspires good actions and acts as a spiritual protector. The fravashis of illustrious ancestors are venerated and can be called on to aid the living. On the fourth day after death, the urvan rejoins its fravashi, carrying the experiences of material life into the continuing battle. Reincarnation is mostly absent from the tradition, though followers of Ilm-e-Kshnoom in India believe in it and practice vegetarianism.

  The Chinvat Bridge, called the bridge of judgement or the bridge of choice, is where each person faces individual judgment. The Yazatas Mithra, Sraosha and Rashnu weigh the soul. The righteous are met by a beautiful, sweet-smelling maiden who represents their Daena, shaped by their actions in life. She leads them across a bridge that widens and becomes pleasant, toward the House of Song. The wicked meet an ugly, foul-smelling old hag. Their bridge narrows to a razor's edge, and they fall into the abyss toward the House of Lies.

  Souls with a balance of good and evil go to Hamistagan, a purgatorial realm mentioned in the 9th-century Dadestan-i Denig. The House of Lies is temporary and reformative. Punishments fit the crimes, and no soul rests in eternal damnation. Its darkness is smothering, and souls are packed tightly together though each believes itself in total isolation. Modern believers are split on whether the bridge describes an afterworld location or a mental decision made in life between good and evil.

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• 4. Fire, Water, and Towers

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  Worshippers of the 5th century BCE were recorded gathering on mounds and hills, where fires were lit beneath open skies. Today enclosed and covered fire temples anchor community worship, and clergy tend fires of varying grades. Fire, called atar, is held especially sacred as a symbol of Ahura Mazda himself. Water, called aban, is the other pillar. The scholar Bettina Robotika, a former professor of South Asian studies, names purification ceremonies with water and fire as the basis of Zoroastrian ritual life.

  Achaemenid expansion carried shrines across the empire. They shaped the roles of Mithra, Aredvi Sura Anahita, Verethragna and Tishtrya, all of whom have hymns in the Avesta. Local deities and culture-heroes found places too. Herbal healing practices and wedding ceremonies still pass down in historically Zoroastrian communities.

  The Avesta calls for the protection of water, earth, fire and air, which led some to name Zoroastrianism the "world's first proponent of ecology." The claim has limits. Early Zoroastrians had a duty to exterminate "evil" species, a dictate modern Zoroastrianism no longer follows.

  The Yasna is the central ritual of the faith. It combines a recitation of the Avestan book of the same name with a sacrificial ceremony involving Haoma. Priests can extend it with the Visperad and Vendidad, but such long forms are rare today. The Yasna descends from Indo-Iranian sacrifice, and the Avesta mentions animal sacrifice. That practice survives in reduced forms, such as offering fat before meals.

  Priests called Mobads hold the purview of the high rituals. A prayer book, the Khordeh Avesta, gathers individual and communal prayers and rites. Traditional ritual has also included shamanic elements. These involve spirit travel to the invisible realm and the consumption of fortified wine, Haoma, mang and other aids.

  The Navjote, also called Sedreh Pushi, welcomes a person into the faith. It is traditionally held in later childhood or the pre-teen years, though no age limit is fixed. Afterward, believers are encouraged to wear the sedreh, a ritual shirt, and the kushti, a ritual girdle, every day as a spiritual reminder and for mystical protection. Reformists tend to wear them only at festivals, ceremonies and prayers.

  Historically, Zoroastrians are encouraged to pray the five daily Gāhs. Prayers called manthras are said with hands outstretched, imitating Zoroaster's prayer style described in the Gathas. Devout believers cover their heads, with a topi, a scarf, other headwear or even just their hands. Full veiling, traditional in Islam, is no part of the faith. Zoroastrian women in Iran wear head coverings that show their hair and faces, defying mandates of the Islamic Republic.

  The Towers of Silence are commonly linked to ritual exposure of the dead. Scripture treats a corpse as a host for decay, or druj, and says it must be disposed of without polluting the good creation. Some communities still practice exposure, mainly in parts of the Indian subcontinent where it is legal and scavenger birds are plentiful.

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• 5. Zoroaster and Legend

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  Estimates for when Zoroaster lived range wildly, from 2000 BCE to "200 years before Alexander." Tradition places him in the 6th century BCE, but many modern historians put him much earlier, in the second half of the second millennium BCE. He was born in either northeast Iran or southwest Afghanistan, into the Spitama clan. His birth and early life are little documented and were heavily speculated upon in later texts.

  The Gathas, hymns thought to be his own, are the firmest record. In them he calls himself a poet-priest and prophet. Texts give him a wife, three sons and three daughters, with the numbers gathered from a variety of sources. His people lived under constant threats of raiding and conflict, and they sought peace and stability.

  He rejected many gods of the Bronze Age Iranians and the oppressive class structure in which the Kavis and Karapans, princes and priests, controlled ordinary people. He opposed cruel animal sacrifice and excessive use of the possibly hallucinogenic Haoma plant. He did not condemn either practice outright, provided moderation was observed.

  At the age of 30, according to later tradition, Zoroaster went into the Daiti river to draw water for a Haoma ceremony. When he emerged, he received a vision of Vohu Manah. Vohu Manah then took him to the other six Amesha Spentas, where the vision was completed. Zoroaster condemned the old Daevas, gods who seemed to delight in war and strife, as evil workers of Angra Mainyu. His ideas were not taken up quickly. At first he had only one convert, his cousin Maidhyoimanha.

  The Cypress of Kashmar is a mythical tree of legendary beauty and enormous size. It is said to have sprung from a branch Zoroaster brought from Paradise, and to have been planted at Kashmar in honor of King Vishtaspa's conversion. The writer Zakariya al-Qazwini tells how the Abbasid caliph Al-Mutawakkil ordered it felled in 247 AH, or 861 CE. The timber was to travel across Iran and serve as beams in his new palace at Samarra. Iranians protested and offered a very great sum of money to save the tree.

  Al-Mutawakkil never saw the cypress. A Turkish soldier, possibly in the pay of the caliph's son, murdered him on the night the timber arrived on the banks of the Tigris.

  The Kashmar Fire Temple is said to be the first Zoroastrian fire temple, built by Vishtaspa at Zoroaster's request. Ferdowsi's Shahnameh recounts Vishtaspa accepting the faith and sending priests across the world. It names Adur Burzen-Mihr, founded at Kashmar with a cypress planted in front, as the first of the fire temples. Remains still stand a few kilometers above the ancient city, in the castle complex of Atashgah. The Paikuli inscription places Kashmar in Greater Khorasan under the Sasanian Empire, which worked hard to revive the ancient religion.

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• 6. The Avesta

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  The Avesta gathers the central religious texts of Zoroastrianism in Avestan, an old Iranian dialect. The version known today dates, at the oldest, to the Sasanian Empire. Its texts were composed at different times, so they work as a series of snapshots showing how the religion changed. The Gathas, its oldest and most central part, record Zoroaster's account of conversations with Ahura Mazda. They sit inside the Yasna, which forms the core of Zoroastrian liturgy.

  Middle Persian tradition says Ahura Mazda created the 21 Nasks of the original Avesta, and that Zoroaster brought them to Vishtaspa. Two copies were made. One was placed in the house of archives and the other in the imperial treasury.

  Alexander's conquest of Persia, tradition holds, destroyed this Avesta, which had been written on 1,200 ox-hides. The scientific sections that the Greeks could use were dispersed among them. The Denkard and the Book of Arda Viraf say Alexander's troops destroyed the royal library at Persepolis. Diodorus Siculus, who completed his work around 60 BCE, appears to back the story. One archaeological examination found that the ruins of the palace of Xerxes I bear traces of burning. Historians, however, see no strong evidence, and whether a vast library of texts in gold ink ever existed remains speculation.

  Tradition credits a series of rulers with rebuilding the lost canon. King Valax, identified with an Arsacid ruler called Vologases, tried first. Under the Sasanians, Ardeshir ordered his high priest Tansar to finish the work. Shapur I sent priests to find the scientific portions held by the Greeks. Under Shapur II, Arderbad Mahrespandand revised the canon to secure its orthodox character. Under Khosrow I, the Avesta was translated into Pahlavi.

  Only the Sasanian compilation can be traced with authority, and only a fraction of it survives today if Middle Persian literature is correct. The surviving manuscripts all postdate the fall of the Sasanian Empire, and the latest dates to 1288. The texts that remain are the Gathas, Yasna, Visperad and Vendidad, though the Vendidad's place in the faith is disputed. The Khordeh Avesta adds the Yashts and other hymns, prayers and rituals. Everything else is called Avestan fragments, because it is incomplete and of unknown origin.

  The 9th and 10th centuries brought a wave of Middle Persian works in the Pahlavi script, mostly written and copied by clergy. The most important include the Denkard, Bundahishn, Menog-i Khrad, Selections of Zadspram, Jamasp Namag, Epistles of Manucher, Rivayats, Dadestan-i-Denig and Arda Viraf Namag. Their authority is disputed. John Hinnells points out that most Iranians stress the revealed Gathas, while orthodox Parsis value the later Pahlavi texts.

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• 7. Empires and Conquest

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  Herodotus completed his Histories around 440 BCE, and with them Zoroastrianism enters recorded history. His account of Greater Iranian society contains features that look recognizably Zoroastrian. He describes the Magi as the sixth tribe of the Medes, men with considerable influence at the Median courts.

  The Median and Persian empires unified in 550 BCE. Cyrus the Great, and later his son Cambyses II, then curtailed the power of the Magi. In 522 BCE the Magi revolted and set up a rival claimant to the throne, who pretended to be Cyrus's younger son Smerdis. Cambyses ruled despotically and spent a long time away in Egypt. Persians, Medes and the other nations accepted the usurper, especially since he granted a remission of taxes for three years.

  Darius I and later Achaemenid emperors acknowledged their devotion to Ahura Mazda in inscriptions, including several times in the Behistun inscription. Whether Darius followed the teachings of Zoroaster is not conclusively established, because worship of Ahura Mazda was not exclusively Zoroastrian. The Achaemenid Empire formalized and institutionalized many tenets and rituals of the faith.

  Alexander the Great's conquests largely displaced Zoroastrianism with Hellenistic beliefs. The religion lived on for centuries in Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the Caucasus. In Cappadocia, Persian colonists cut off from Iran kept the faith of their forefathers. Strabo, writing in the first century BCE, recorded that these "fire kindlers" had many holy places and fire temples. He described enclosures with an altar holding a large quantity of ashes, where the magi keep the fire ever burning.

  Renewed interest came only near the end of the Parthian Empire, which lasted from 247 BCE-224 CE. The Sasanian Empire revitalized and standardized the faith and aggressively promoted its Zurvanite form. Sasanian rulers often built fire temples in captured territories. In the Caucasus they met considerable success, and in Georgia the religion was still widely practiced in the 5th century CE as something like a second established religion. As late as the Parthian period, a form of Zoroastrianism had been the dominant religion in the Armenian lands.

  The Sasanians distrusted Roman Christianity because of Persia's rivalry with the Christian Roman Empire. After the reign of Constantine the Great they sometimes persecuted it. In 451 CE they clashed with their Armenian subjects at the Battle of Avarayr, and the Armenians officially broke with the Roman Church. The Sasanians tolerated or even sometimes favored the Christianity of the Church of the East. They also enforced a four-part caste system in line with Zoroastrian doctrine. It ranked the Asronan, or priests, the Arteshtaran, or warriors, the Wastaryoshan, or commoners, and the Hutukhshan, or artisans.

  Over 22 years in the 7th century, the emerging Muslim caliphate conquered most of the Sasanian Empire. At first there was little serious pressure to adopt Islam. Because of their sheer numbers, Zoroastrians had to be treated as dhimmis, which made them eligible for protection in exchange for tribute. The Arabs adopted the Sasanian tax system, including the jizya, a poll-tax on non-Muslims. In time the jizya became a means to humble non-Muslims, and laws and restrictions emphasized their inferior status.

  Under Abbasid rule, Muslim Iranians were by then in the majority, and in many instances they mistreated local Zoroastrians. In the 10th century, a Tower of Silence was completed at much trouble and expense. On that very day a Muslim official contrived to climb onto it and call the adhan from its walls. This became a pretext to annex the building. The scholar Al-Biruni found few records left of the Khawarizmians. He blamed Qutayba ibn Muslim, who ruined those who could read and write their script and knew the history of the country.

  Social and economic pressure to convert was slow but steady. Nobles and city-dwellers converted first, while peasants and the landed gentry accepted Islam more slowly. A legend arose that Husayn, son of the fourth caliph Ali, had married a captive Sassanid princess named Shahrbanu. It made Islam seem partly Iranian. According to the scholar Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians alone no longer stood for patriotism and loyalty to the past. The Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads in 750 with Iranian support, and Muslim Iranians then received marked favor in the new government.

  In Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan, the 9th-century Arab commander Qutaiba had to convert his province four times. The citizens reverted to their old religion the first three times. Finally the governor made that religion difficult in every way and turned the local fire temple into a mosque. He also paid each person two dirhams to attend Friday prayers.

  Many Zoroastrians chose to migrate. Some went to cities in or near the great salt deserts, especially Yazd and Kerman, which remain centers of Iranian Zoroastrianism today. Yazd became the seat of the Iranian high priests under Mongol Ilkhanate rule, when a non-Muslim's best hope of survival was to be inconspicuous. A further migration from the town of Sanjan, in south-western Khorasan, reached Gujarat in western India. The descendants of that group are the Parsis, a name Gujaratis traditionally gave to anyone from Iran. In the 16th century, the priests of Yazd wrote to their co-religionists in India that no period, not even that of Alexander, had been more grievous than "this millennium of the demon of Wrath."

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• 8. Parsis and the Modern Faith

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  The Rev. John Wilson led missionary campaigns in 19th-century India against the Parsi community. He disparaged Parsis for their "dualism" and "polytheism" and for unnecessary rituals, and he declared the Avesta not divinely inspired. Dismay spread through the relatively uneducated community, which blamed its priests, and some Parsis converted to Christianity.

  The German orientalist and philologist Martin Haug then led a rallying defense of the faith. He reinterpreted the Avesta through a Christianized, European orientalist lens. In his view Zoroastrianism was solely monotheistic, with every other divinity reduced to the status of an angel. Ahura Mazda became omnipotent and the source of both good and evil. That was a sharp change from a creator who does not make evil. Haug's thinking spread as a Parsi interpretation, which seemed to confirm his theory. It became almost universally accepted as doctrine, though it is now being re-evaluated in modern Zoroastrianism and academia.

  Scholars still disagree about what Zoroastrianism is. Prods Oktor Skjærvø calls it dualistic and polytheistic with one supreme god, the father of the ordered cosmos. Yujin Nagasawa notes that the Old Avesta does not teach monotheism, while Md. Sayem calls the faith one of the oldest monotheistic religions. Almut Hintze argues for its own form of monotheism that combines dualism and polytheism. Brian Arthur Brown says the historic texts present a picture ranging from one god and two gods to a best-god henotheism. The economist Mario Ferrero suggests a shift from polytheism to monotheism under political and economic pressures.

  Today Zoroastrians divide into two main schools of thought, reformists and traditionalists. Traditionalists, mostly Parsis, accept Middle Persian literature alongside the Gathas and Avesta. They generally do not allow conversion, so a Zoroastrian must be born to Zoroastrian parents. Some recognize the children of mixed marriages, usually only if the father is a born Zoroastrian. Neo-Zoroastrians, or revivalists, reinterpret the faith toward Western concerns and present it as a living religion. They and the reformists tend to center the Gathas without rejecting other texts, except the Vendidad.

  Since the 19th century, the Parsis have earned a reputation for education and wide influence. Several of the best-known business conglomerates of India are run by Parsi-Zoroastrian families, including the Tata, Godrej and Wadia families. The Zoroastrians of the Indian subcontinent, the Parsis and Iranis, have not engaged in conversion since at least the 18th century. High priests have historically argued there is no reason to forbid it, and the Revayats support them, though later priests condemned those judgments. In Iran, the Council of Tehran Mobeds endorses conversion, but conversion from Islam is illegal under the laws of the Islamic Republic.

  At the request of the government of Tajikistan, UNESCO declared 2003 a year to celebrate the "3,000th anniversary of Zoroastrian culture." In 2011 the Tehran Mobeds Anjuman announced that women had been ordained in Iran and North America as mobedyars, or women assistant mobeds. They hold official certificates, can perform lower-rung religious functions and can initiate people into the religion.

  India's 2001 census counted 69,601 Parsis, about 0.006% of the population, concentrated in and around Mumbai. By 2008 the birth-to-death ratio was 1:5, with 200 births a year against 1,000 deaths. The 2011 census recorded 57,264 Parsi Zoroastrians. Restrictions on conversion, strict endogamy, casteism and low birth rates are blamed for the decline. In Iran, the last census before the revolution of 1979, in 1974, recorded 21,400 Zoroastrians. The 2011 census recorded 25,271, while Zoroastrian groups there say about 60,000. Counts in Iran diverge, so global totals stay imprecise.

  Pakistan's 2023 census found 2,348 Parsis, with 1,656, or 70.5%, in the Karachi Division. The 2021 Canadian census counted 7,285 Zoroastrians, and the 2021 census of England and Wales found 4,105. More than half of those, 2,050, live in London. Reports from Iraqi Kurdistan claimed as many as 100,000 recent converts, but independent sources have not confirmed this. A 2024 estimate put the region's number at nearly 5,000, mostly in Sulaymaniya Governorate. In 2020, Historic England published A Survey of Zoroastrianism Buildings in England, which identified four buildings used by Zoroastrians.

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