What is Zoroastrianism? One of the world's oldest faiths

Zoroastrianism is the religion founded in ancient Iran by the prophet Zarathustra, known to the Greeks as Zoroaster. It teaches that one wise God, Ahura Mazda, made a good world, that evil is a destructive force opposed to it, and that every person must choose a side through good thoughts, good words and good deeds. It was the faith of Persia's great empires for about a thousand years, and survives today in small communities.

In short

• Zoroastrians worship one God, Ahura Mazda, and see life as a choice between asha (truth and right order) and druj (the lie).
• Fire is a symbol of God's light and purity, kept burning in fire temples; Zoroastrians pray before it but do not worship it.
• Ideas such as a judgment after death, heaven and hell, and a final renewal of the world appear early in Zoroastrian texts, and how far they shaped Judaism, Christianity and Islam is still argued.

Who was Zarathustra, and when did he live?

Almost everything known of Zarathustra comes from the Gathas, 17 hymns in an archaic language, Old Avestan, that tradition and most scholars attribute to him. They show a priest of the Spitama family who broke with the many-god religion of his people, condemned its war-loving gods, the daevas, as false, and taught that only Ahura Mazda, the "Wise Lord", deserved worship. By tradition his first followers were few, and his teaching took hold only when a ruler named Vishtaspa accepted it (BBC Religions). He lived somewhere in the east of the Iranian world, in today's eastern Iran, Afghanistan or Central Asia.

Still argued

When Zarathustra lived is one of the widest open questions in the history of religion, with estimates spread over more than a thousand years. Later Zoroastrian tradition placed him in the 6th century BCE, "258 years before Alexander", and some historians still prefer a date close to that. Many scholars, following the language of the Gathas, which is very close to that of India's oldest hymns, the Rig Veda, place him much earlier, roughly 1500 to 1000 BCE. Neither side has a text or an archaeological find that settles it.

The name became famous in the West for another reason. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called his 1883–1885 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but its hero speaks for Nietzsche, not for the prophet.

What do Zoroastrians believe?

Zoroastrians believe in one God, Ahura Mazda, who is wholly good and made a good world. Evil is not God's creation but an attack on it, led by a destructive spirit, Angra Mainyu (in later Persian, Ahriman). The world is the ground on which the two meet, and human beings are not spectators. Each person is free, and each choice for truth weakens the lie. The religion's three-word ethics, in the Avestan phrases humata, hukhta, hvarshta, are good thoughts, good words, good deeds.

The moral order of the universe is called asha: truth, rightness, the way things should be. Its opposite is druj, the lie. Ahura Mazda is attended by six or seven holy beings, the Amesha Spentas, who stand for good mind, right order, devotion, health, immortality and other aspects of God, and who are each linked to part of creation, such as fire, water, earth and cattle. Zoroastrians often explain them as qualities of God and goals for people, rather than as separate gods.

The teaching looks forward. At death, the soul is said to cross the Chinvat Bridge, the "bridge of the separator", which widens for the righteous and narrows to a blade for the wicked, who fall into the House of the Lie. At the end of time a savior, the Saoshyant, will come, the dead will be raised, evil will be destroyed, and the world will be made new in an event called frashokereti, "making wonderful".

What is the Avesta?

The Avesta is the Zoroastrian scripture: a collection of hymns, prayers and ritual texts in the Avestan language. The Gathas are its oldest and most sacred part, set inside a longer liturgy, the Yasna, which priests still recite. Other parts include hymns to divine beings, the Yashts, and a book of purity laws, the Videvdad. For centuries the texts were passed down by memory. They were written down only under the Sasanian kings, after an alphabet was devised to record their sounds exactly, and the oldest manuscript that survives dates from 1323 (Wikipedia). Much more was once known and has been lost: Zoroastrian tradition blames Alexander the Great, whom it calls "the accursed", and later the Arab conquest.

Do Zoroastrians worship fire?

No. That is the commonest mistake about the religion, and Zoroastrians reject the old label "fire-worshippers". Fire is the clearest symbol of Ahura Mazda's light, energy and purity, and so prayers are said facing a source of light: the sun, a lamp or a sacred fire (BBC Religions). A fire temple keeps such a fire burning, fed several times a day by priests whose mouths are covered with a cloth so that their breath does not pollute it. The highest grade of fire, an Atash Behram, is consecrated in a long ritual from 16 different kinds of fire, including fire from a lightning strike.

Daily practice centers on purity and prayer. Here is how a Zoroastrian's religious life is marked out:

1. Initiation. Usually between the ages of 7 and 15, a child is invested with a white cotton shirt, the sudreh, and a woolen cord, the kusti, in a ceremony called navjote among Parsis and sedreh-pushi in Iran.
2. Daily prayer. The day is divided into five periods, gahs. At prayer the kusti is untied and retied, wound three times around the waist for good thoughts, good words and good deeds.
3. Festivals. The year has seasonal feasts, the gahanbars, and starts with Nowruz, the spring new year that is still the main holiday of Iran and much of Central Asia.
4. Death. To keep earth and fire from being polluted, the dead were traditionally laid in a "tower of silence", a dakhma, for vultures. Many communities now use cremation or burial instead.

Did Zoroastrianism shape Judaism, Christianity and Islam?

The question arises because of a meeting in history. In 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon and let the exiled Jews go home. The Achaemenid kings who followed him invoked Ahura Mazda in their inscriptions, though whether they practiced Zoroastrianism as later Zoroastrians understood it is itself debated. Ideas that are faint in the older parts of the Hebrew Bible, such as angels and demons, a single opponent of God, resurrection and a last judgment, are prominent in Jewish texts from after that time, and later in Christianity and Islam.

Still argued

Position	What its holders argue
Strong influence	The scholar Mary Boyce argued that Zarathustra first taught individual judgment, heaven and hell, and bodily resurrection, and that the other religions borrowed them
Some influence, degree unclear	Many historians of [[what-is-judaism
Little or none provable	Others point out that most Zoroastrian texts were written down after the Bible, that the ideas could have developed inside Judaism or come through Greek thought, and that no borrowing can be traced in the texts themselves

The dating problem is at the heart of it: if the written Avesta is late, it is hard to show which way an idea traveled.

Where are Zoroastrians today?

Zoroastrianism was the leading religion of three Iranian empires and the state religion of the last of them. After the Arab conquest of the 7th century, most Iranians became Muslim over the next centuries, and the faith shrank to a minority.

When	What happened
c. 550–330 BCE	Achaemenid Persian Empire; its kings invoke Ahura Mazda
330 BCE	Alexander conquers Persia
224–651 CE	Sasanian Empire; Zoroastrianism is the state religion, and the Avesta is written down
630s–651 CE	Arab armies conquer Iran
c. 8th–10th century	By tradition, a group of Zoroastrians sails to Gujarat, in western India; their descendants are the Parsis
19th–20th century	Parsis thrive in Bombay (Mumbai) under British rule; later, many Zoroastrians emigrate to Britain, North America and Australia

The community is small and shrinking, because births are few and most Zoroastrian groups do not accept converts. A survey for the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America (FEZANA) estimated 111,691 to 121,962 Zoroastrians worldwide in 2012, and India's 2011 census counted 57,264 Parsis and Zoroastrians (Wikipedia). In Iran, Zoroastrians are a recognized minority with a seat reserved in parliament. What scholars mean by calling such an ancient tradition a religion at all is the subject of what religion is.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: why do Zoroastrians pray facing fire, and why is "fire-worshipper" wrong?
• What choice does Zoroastrianism put before every person, and what are its three parts?
• Why does the date of Zarathustra matter so much to the question of influence on other religions?

Sources

• Zoroaster — BBC Religions, 2009
• Zoroastrian worship — BBC Religions, 2009
• Zoroastrianism — World History Encyclopedia, Joshua J. Mark, 2019
• Zoroastrianism — Wikipedia
• Parsis — Wikipedia
• Avesta — Wikipedia