Zoroastrianism: Beliefs, Fire Temples and the Parsi Community Today
Zoroastrianism is the Iranian religion of Zarathustra, built on one good creator, a hostile spirit and a human duty to choose. This guide covers the Gathas, Ahura Mazda and the problem of evil, fire temples and the sudreh and kusti, the Chinvat bridge and the Towers of Silence, the disputed influence on Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the Parsi and Irani communities today.
What is Zoroastrianism, and what do Zoroastrians believe?
Zoroastrianism is the ancient Iranian religion founded on the teaching of Zarathustra, and it holds that one uncreated god, Ahura Mazda, made a wholly good world, that a hostile spirit attacked that world, and that every human being is obliged to choose a side. The choice is the whole of the religion. Ahura Mazda is the Wise Lord, maker of sky, water, earth, plants, cattle and people, and he is good without remainder, which means he did not make suffering, disease or death. Those belong to Angra Mainyu, the Destructive Spirit, who works through the Lie. Zoroastrians call the true order of things asha and its opposite druj, and a person joins one or the other by what they think, say and do. The ethical program compresses into three words that Zoroastrian children learn before anything else: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. There is no monastic withdrawal here and no ascetic ideal. Marrying, raising children, farming well, keeping your word and giving to those with less are the ways a person strengthens the good creation. History runs once and forward, never in circles. Judgment comes to each soul separately, on the fourth dawn after death, and at the end of time the world is repaired and creation restored whole.
The sources make Zoroastrianism unusually hard to describe in a single voice. The oldest layer, the Old Avestan hymns, is roughly the length of a pamphlet and sits in a language nobody spoke by the time the texts were fixed. The Younger Avestan material, including the hymns called Yashts and the purity code of the Videvdad, is later and far broader. The systematic theology that most summaries quote, including the twelve thousand year scheme of world history, comes from Middle Persian books such as the Bundahishn and the Denkard, compiled in the ninth and tenth centuries CE, well after Muslim rule began in Iran. Scholars therefore argue continuously about which doctrines are original and which were worked out late. Zoroastrians disagree about the label too. Reformist Parsis since the nineteenth century have described the religion as strictly monotheistic and read Angra Mainyu as a name for human moral failure, while traditionalists keep the adversary literal, and the historian Mary Boyce defended the ancient dualism as the honest reading of the texts.
What is the Avesta, and what is in it?
The Avesta is the Zoroastrian scripture, a library of texts of different ages and dialects, preserved in a liturgical language called Avestan. It contains the Yasna, the central act of worship, which carries the seventeen hymns, grouped into five Gathas, attributed to Zarathustra; the Visperad, an extension of the Yasna for holy days; the Yashts, hymns addressed to individual divine beings; the Videvdad, a code of purity law; and the Khordeh Avesta, the short prayer book that laypeople actually use each day.
What does the word asha mean?
Asha is the Zoroastrian word for truth, right order and the way things are supposed to be, covering physical regularity and moral rightness in one term. Its Vedic cognate is rta. A person who lives by it is an ashavan. The opposite, druj, means the Lie, and it names deception and disorder together, so perjury and fouling a river belong to the same category of offense.
What are the Amesha Spentas?
The Amesha Spentas, or Bounteous Immortals, are six divine beings through whom Ahura Mazda acts: Vohu Manah (Good Mind), Asha Vahishta (Best Truth), Khshathra Vairya (Desirable Dominion), Spenta Armaiti (Holy Devotion), Haurvatat (Wholeness) and Ameretat (Immortality). Each is at once an aspect of Ahura Mazda and a quality the worshipper is meant to acquire. Each also has a part of the good creation in its keeping: Armaiti holds the earth, Haurvatat the waters, Ameretat the plants.
Who was Zarathustra, and what do the Gathas say he taught?
Zarathustra, called Zoroaster in Greek, was an Iranian priest and poet who composed the Gathas, seventeen hymns that sit inside the Zoroastrian liturgy and are the only texts scholars broadly agree came from him. He describes himself as a zaotar, a trained sacrificial priest, which places him inside an existing Indo-Iranian religious system, trained in the very rites he would go on to argue about. The Gathas teach that Ahura Mazda alone deserves worship; that two opposed spirits stand behind the world and their difference is moral rather than natural; that human beings hold a real choice between them; that the daevas, gods other Iranians honored, chose wrongly and must be rejected; and that everyone faces judgment at a crossing called the Chinvat bridge. They also complain. Zarathustra asks Ahura Mazda plainly why the violent prosper, describes being driven out with few followers, names the karapans and kavis, the priests and chiefs who opposed him, and thanks a patron called Kavi Vishtaspa for shelter. Yasna 29 opens with the soul of the ox crying out for protection against cattle raiders. The tone belongs to a working priest arguing his case in public, and that argumentative quality is why the Gathas still read like one man's voice.
Nobody knows when Zarathustra lived, and the gap between the candidate dates runs to more than a thousand years. A late tradition preserved by Greek and Middle Persian writers places him 258 years before Alexander, which yields a sixth century BCE date and would make him a near contemporary of the first Persian empire. Linguists mostly reject that. Old Avestan is so close to the language of the Rigveda in grammar and meter that many specialists date it to the second millennium BCE, and the Gathas describe a pastoral world of cattle, chariots and small chiefdoms, with no cities, no writing and no mention of Persians, Medes or Assyrians. Mary Boyce argued on those grounds for a date deep in the Bronze Age. A minority position holds that no individual founder can be recovered at all, and that Zarathustra is a figure the tradition assembled around an inherited body of poetry. The defensible summary is that the Gathas are securely old and their author securely unlocated in time.
What language are the Gathas written in?
The Gathas are in Old Avestan, sometimes called Gathic Avestan, an eastern Iranian language close to Vedic Sanskrit and unintelligible to later Zoroastrians without commentary. The entire Old Avestan corpus is tiny. It runs to the Gathas, the prose Yasna Haptanghaiti and a handful of sacred formulas, and because that vocabulary is so limited, a large share of it appears only once in the surviving material, leaving translators to argue from context rather than from parallel usage. That is the main reason published versions diverge so widely.
Did Zarathustra found a new religion or reform an old one?
Both readings have support. Zarathustra worked with inherited Indo-Iranian material: the term ahura matches the Vedic asura, the ritual plant haoma matches soma, and the priestly vocabulary is shared across both branches. What he changed was the moral structure, subordinating everything to one god and demanding that worshippers reject the daevas outright. Scholars who stress the continuity call him a reformer; those who stress the exclusive claim call him a founder.
Which translation of the Gathas should a beginner read?
Read more than one, because no two Gatha translations agree and a reader who sees only one will mistake a translator's guess for the text itself. Versions by Stanley Insler, Helmut Humbach and Prods Oktor Skjaervo are standard among specialists. Devotional translations produced inside the Parsi community read far more smoothly but tend to smooth away the obscurities as well, so keep a scholarly version open beside them.
Who is Ahura Mazda, and how does Zoroastrian dualism explain evil?
Ahura Mazda is the uncreated creator of everything good, and Zoroastrian dualism explains evil by refusing to make him its author. Evil originates in a separate will, Angra Mainyu, later called Ahriman, who is hostile by a choice he made at the beginning and never revoked. He is not a creature of Ahura Mazda in this scheme, which is the point of the arrangement. The founding statement is Yasna 30, where two spirits are described as twins who met at the beginning and chose, one taking the better and one the worse, and the hymn adds that the daevas chose wrongly between them. That structure buys something and costs something. It buys a clean answer to the problem of evil, a good god who cannot be blamed for cancer, cruelty or drought, because those belong to an enemy and not to the design. It costs omnipotence inside history, since Ahura Mazda has to fight a genuine opponent over real time. Zoroastrian cosmology accepts the cost and then limits it. Ahriman gets a fixed term, nine thousand years under the pact the Bundahishn says Ohrmazd offered him, and the Middle Persian books lay out a bounded world history in which the enemy is trapped inside creation, worn down and finally destroyed. Good wins by exhausting the enemy, not by having secretly been in control the whole time.
Summaries of Zoroastrian dualism contradict each other because their authors are quoting different layers of it. In the Gathas the opposition runs between Spenta Mainyu, the bounteous spirit through which Ahura Mazda acts, and Angra Mainyu, so the pairing is spirit against spirit with Ahura Mazda above it. In Middle Persian theology the pairing is Ohrmazd against Ahriman directly, which reads as a much starker two god system and shaped the outside view of Zoroastrianism for centuries. A third variant, Zurvanism, made Zurvan, boundless Time, the father of both, and it appears to have had influence under the Sasanians before vanishing. Nineteenth century Parsi reformers, under Protestant and rationalist pressure, reinterpreted Ahriman as a name for human wrongdoing, and that reading is now common in Parsi teaching while traditionalists keep the literal adversary. Readers reaching for a comparison should note that Zoroastrian dualism is moral and asymmetrical, which makes it the opposite of the balance model described in Yin and Yang: The Real Meaning Behind the Symbol.
Are Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu equal in power?
No, and Zoroastrian texts reject the idea directly. Angra Mainyu is destructive but not creative; he can spoil what Ahura Mazda has made and cannot make anything himself. He is also bounded in time, confined to a fixed period after which he is defeated and abolished, while Ahura Mazda is unlimited. Describing Zoroastrianism as a religion of two matched gods misstates it in a way the tradition itself denies.
What are the daevas?
Daevas are the beings Zarathustra rejected, a class of Indo-Iranian gods that Zoroastrianism reclassified as demons serving the Lie. The word is cognate with Sanskrit deva, which kept its positive sense in India, so the two branches inverted each other: the Iranian ahura is the Vedic asura, demoted in India, while the Vedic deva is demoted in Iran. The modern Persian div, meaning demon, descends from daeva.
What was Zurvanism?
Zurvanism was a Zoroastrian variant that made Zurvan, personified boundless Time, the father of both Ohrmazd and Ahriman, resolving the awkwardness of two uncreated principles by placing a single origin above them. It is known mainly through hostile Armenian, Syriac and Greek reports. No Zoroastrian scripture describes it, it seems to have had support at the Sasanian court, and it left behind no surviving community or liturgy.
What does good thoughts, good words, good deeds ask of a Zoroastrian?
Good thoughts, good words, good deeds, in Avestan humata, hukhta and huvarshta, asks a Zoroastrian to keep intention, speech and action aligned to truth in ordinary daily life, and it is an ethical obligation, binding whether or not it pays. The triad covers the three places a person can act. A thought counts because contempt held privately still puts you on the side of the Lie. A word counts because Zoroastrian ethics take promises with unusual seriousness; Mithra, the divinity of the covenant, is named for the word contract, and the Mihr Yasht promises ruin to the house of the man who breaks one. A deed counts because the good creation is understood to need active maintenance, and the tradition praises farming, watering dry ground, planting trees, breeding useful animals and endowing wells and rest houses. Work is worship in a fairly literal sense here. Zoroastrianism has no monasticism, no celibate clergy, no vow of poverty and no calendar of food fasts, and the Middle Persian advice literature treats a person who withdraws from the world as a man shirking his duty. Happiness is treated as legitimate, and self-deprivation earns a Zoroastrian nothing.
The measure Zoroastrian ethics applies is proportion. Middle Persian moral texts use the word paymanag, meaning the mean or the right measure, and treat most vices as an excess or a deficiency of something otherwise good, in a scheme readers of Aristotle will find familiar. Wisdom literature such as the Menog i Khrad and the andarz sections of the Denkard works this through in practical terms: how much to spend, when to speak, how to treat servants and dependents, at what point generosity turns into waste. The triad also gets misread. Because it names thought first, English language spiritual writing sometimes presents it as an early version of the claim that thinking shapes circumstance, which is a New Thought idea with a documented nineteenth century American origin and no relation to Avestan ethics; that claim gets its own examination in Law of Attraction: How the Practice Works and Where It Falls Short. A Zoroastrian is asked to think well because thinking badly is already a wrong.
Do Zoroastrians fast or practice asceticism?
Zoroastrianism has no tradition of fasting from food, on the reasoning that a weakened body defends the good creation badly. Many Parsis do abstain from meat on four days of each month, those dedicated to Bahman, Mah, Gosh and Ram, the first three connected with the protection of animals. Marriage is a religious duty, and the Denkard treats a childless life as a loss to the good creation.
What are the sudreh and kusti?
The sudreh is a thin white cotton undershirt and the kusti is a cord of seventy two woven lamb's wool threads worn over it, passed three times around the waist and knotted front and back. Both are received at the initiation ceremony, called navjote among Parsis and sedreh pushi in Iran, usually between the ages of seven and fifteen. Untying and retying the kusti frames each of the daily prayers.
How often do Zoroastrians pray?
The Zoroastrian day divides into five watches, called gahs, and observant Zoroastrians pray in each one: Havan through the morning, Rapithwin at midday, Uzerin in the afternoon, Aiwisruthrem after sunset and Ushahin from midnight to dawn. Prayer is recited standing and facing a light source. It opens with the kusti ritual, in which the cord is untied and retied while the worshipper recites a short renunciation of evil.
Why do Zoroastrians pray before fire, and what happens inside a fire temple?
Zoroastrians pray in front of fire because atar, fire, is treated as the clearest visible sign of Ahura Mazda and of asha, so it gives prayer a direction, and Zoroastrians will tell you firmly that the fire itself is not the object of worship. Any source of light will do. Someone praying at home faces a lamp, the sun or the moon, and the temple simply supplies the purest available flame. A fire temple, called dar-e mehr or agiary, is built around a sanctum holding a consecrated fire in a large metal urn. Only an initiated priest enters that room. He tends the fire at each of the five watches, feeds it sandalwood and other clean dry wood, and wears a white cloth over nose and mouth so that his breath and saliva never reach it. Laypeople stand in an outer chamber, hand over sandalwood, pray, and receive ash from the priest to mark the forehead. There is no sermon, no congregational singing and no fixed weekly service; people come when they wish, and the ceremony that matters most, the Yasna, is performed by priests in a separate ritual room with no congregation present.
Temple fire worship is younger than Zarathustra. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, reported that the Persians built no temples and made no images, sacrificing instead on hilltops, and the archaeological record for enclosed fire sanctuaries begins later; Mary Boyce argued that the institution developed under the Achaemenids partly as a response to image shrines. Under the Sasanians, great state fires such as Adur Gushnasp in the northwest became imperial property, and a king's regnal years could be counted by them. Fires are ranked. The highest grade, the Atash Behram or Victorious Fire, is assembled from sixteen different kinds of fire, one of them taken from a lightning strike, and its consecration runs for about a year. The middle grade is the Atash Adaran; the third, the Atash Dadgah, needs far less ceremony and can be tended by laypeople. Once installed, a fire is never allowed to go out. The Iranshah fire now at Udvada in Gujarat is held by Parsi tradition to have burned continuously since the community's earliest centuries in India, moved from refuge to refuge in dangerous years.
Can a non-Zoroastrian enter a fire temple?
In India, no. Parsi practice bars non Zoroastrians from fire temples entirely, including spouses and uninitiated children of mixed marriages, and the rule is enforced. Iranian practice has been looser. The Yazd fire temple, for example, allows visitors to view the flame through glass from an adjoining room, a concession to tourism that stops at the doorway of the ritual space.
What is the difference between an Atash Behram and an Atash Dadgah?
The grade of consecration. An Atash Behram is the highest, requiring fire gathered from sixteen sources and roughly a year of purification, and only nine exist: eight in India, at Udvada, Navsari, Surat and Mumbai, and one at Yazd in Iran. An Atash Adaran is the middle grade, consecrated from four sources. An Atash Dadgah is a local or household hearth fire that a layperson may tend.
Why do Zoroastrian priests cover the mouth?
The cloth is called a padan. It keeps breath, saliva and any particle from the mouth off the consecrated fire, which such contact would pollute. Zoroastrian purity law treats whatever leaves a living body as contaminating, and the sacred fire is the point where that rule bites hardest: the same reasoning gives you the tongs used to feed the flame, the insistence on dry clean wood, and the closed sanctum.
What do Zoroastrians believe happens after death?
Zoroastrians believe a person lives once, is judged individually a few days after death, and then waits for a general bodily resurrection at the end of history when the world itself is repaired. The soul stays near the body for three days. At dawn on the fourth it reaches the Chinvat bridge, the Bridge of the Separator, where its own conscience, the daena, meets it as a young woman if it lived by truth and as a hag if it lived by the Lie. Mithra, Sraosha and Rashnu weigh the record. For the righteous the bridge widens and leads to the House of Song; for the wicked it narrows to the edge of a blade and drops them into the House of the Lie; those whose good and bad balance exactly go to Hamistagan, a neutral place with neither torment nor reward. None of it is permanent. At the frashokereti, the making wonderful, a savior called the Saoshyant raises the dead in their bodies, every soul passes through a river of molten metal, and punishment ends. Nothing is reborn in this system, so the comparisons some readers expect belong to Reincarnation: How Different Traditions Describe Rebirth.
Zoroastrian funerary practice answers a purity problem, and the afterlife doctrine has almost nothing to do with it. A corpse counts as the most polluting thing there is, occupied by the demon Nasu, so burial would defile the earth, burning would defile fire, and immersion would defile water. The traditional answer was exposure. The body is carried to a dakhma, a circular stone tower open to the sky, and left for vultures, after which the dried bones fall into a central well. Exposure has largely broken down. Vulture numbers across South Asia collapsed from the 1990s after veterinary diclofenac, given to cattle, proved lethal to birds feeding on the carcasses, and the Mumbai towers at Doongerwadi now rely on solar concentrators that work poorly through the monsoon. In Iran the practice was prohibited and had ended by the 1970s, and Iranian Zoroastrians now bury in graves lined with stone or concrete so the body does not touch soil. Most diaspora Zoroastrians bury or cremate, and the community argues about all of it.
What is a Tower of Silence?
A Tower of Silence, dakhma in Persian, is a roofless circular stone structure on high ground where Zoroastrians traditionally place their dead for excarnation by birds. The floor slopes inward in three concentric rings, for men, women and children, toward a central well where sun bleached bones are gathered. The English name is modern. It was coined in nineteenth century British India and translates nothing in either Persian or Avestan.
What is Hamistagan?
Hamistagan is the Zoroastrian intermediate state for souls whose good and bad deeds weigh exactly equal, described in Middle Persian texts as a place without joy and without torture where the only discomfort is cold and heat. It solves the arithmetic problem created by running judgment as a weighing, since someone has to land on the line. Unlike purgatory it involves no purification, only waiting for the final restoration.
Who is the Saoshyant?
The Saoshyant is the future savior who brings about the final renovation, born in the developed tradition to a virgin who bathes in a lake where Zarathustra's seed has been miraculously preserved. Older texts use the term more loosely, and in the plural, for anyone who advances the good. Three such figures appear in the millennial scheme, one at the close of each thousand year period, with the last raising the dead.
How did Zoroastrianism shape Judaism, Christianity and Islam?
Zoroastrianism is widely credited with shaping the eschatology of Judaism and, through it, Christianity and Islam, though the strength of the evidence is disputed and the direction of borrowing is hard to prove. The historical opportunity is not in question. Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BCE and permitted the exiled Judeans to return, and Isaiah 45 calls him the Lord's anointed, an extraordinary title for a foreign king. Jewish communities then lived under Persian rule for roughly two centuries. Doctrines thin or absent in earlier Hebrew scripture and prominent afterward include a ranked hierarchy of named angels, an adversary who hardens into Satan from a functionary of the divine court, bodily resurrection, a final judgment, a coming savior, and a cosmic war between light and darkness of the kind visible in the Dead Sea Scrolls. All of these are at home in Iranian religion first. Christianity inherited the package through Second Temple Judaism, and Islam shares the bridge over hell, the ranked angels and the resurrection of bodies. Vocabulary traveled as well: the English word paradise descends from an Old Iranian term for a walled garden, pairidaeza, by way of Greek.
The case has a methodological hole that specialists keep pointing at. Almost every detailed Zoroastrian text describing resurrection, judgment and the end of the world reached written form only in the ninth and tenth centuries, long after the Jewish and Christian material it supposedly influenced, so a skeptic can argue that borrowing ran the other way or that both drew on shared regional ideas. Mary Boyce argued strongly for Iranian priority, holding that the Middle Persian books preserve much older oral doctrine transmitted by priests. James Barr argued in the 1980s that the case had been asserted far more often than demonstrated, and that the parallels were being read too loosely to carry weight. Shaul Shaked took a middle position: the contact was real, and neither system derives simply from the other. The reasonable summary is that Persian rule gave Judaism two centuries of exposure to a developed apocalyptic religion, that the resemblances are too specific to wave away, and that no single doctrine can be shown to have crossed at a datable moment.
Did Zoroastrianism give Judaism the idea of Satan?
Possibly, though the argument concerns development rather than invention. In the Hebrew Bible ha-satan is a title, the accuser, a member of the divine court who acts with God's permission, as in Job. In later Jewish and then Christian writing he becomes an independent enemy of God with a kingdom of his own, which resembles Angra Mainyu closely. Whether Iranian contact produced that shift or merely accompanied it remains unresolved.
Where does the word paradise come from?
Paradise comes from the Old Iranian pairidaeza, built from words for around and wall, so it named a walled enclosure or park. Xenophon uses the Greek borrowing paradeisos for the hunting parks of Persian kings. Translators rendering the Hebrew Bible into Greek then applied it to the garden of Eden, and from there the word drifted upward into meaning heaven itself.
Is Roman Mithraism the same religion as Zoroastrianism?
No. Mithra is a genuine Zoroastrian divinity, guardian of contracts and one of the judges at the bridge, but the Roman mystery cult of Mithras that spread through the army in the first three centuries CE had bull slaying imagery, seven initiatory grades and underground meeting rooms with no Iranian precedent. Franz Cumont argued for direct descent; most later scholars, including Roger Beck, read it as a Roman creation using Persian branding.
Who are the Parsis, and where do Zoroastrians live today?
The Parsis are the descendants of Zoroastrians who left Iran for the west coast of India after the Muslim conquest, and they remain the largest and most visible Zoroastrian community in the world. Their own account of the migration comes from the Qissa-i Sanjan, a Persian verse narrative written by a priest, Bahman Kaikobad, in 1599, centuries after the events it recounts. It has the refugees sailing from Hormuz, landing first at Diu and then at Sanjan in Gujarat, negotiating terms with a local ruler, and installing the fire that became the Iranshah. Historians read the poem as community memory, and the migration it compresses into a single voyage was probably a trickle across generations. From Sanjan the community spread to Navsari, Surat and, from the eighteenth century, to Bombay, where Parsi families built shipyards, textile mills and trading houses under British rule and produced figures such as the industrialist Jamsetji Tata, the nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji and the revolutionary Bhikaji Cama. India recorded 57,264 Parsis in its 2011 census. Iran keeps a smaller community around Yazd, Kerman and Tehran, recognized in the constitution with a reserved parliamentary seat, and a diaspora has grown across North America, Britain, Australia and the Gulf.
The community is shrinking, for reasons that are plainly demographic: late marriage, small families, a high share who never marry at all, emigration, and marriage outside the community whose children are frequently not accepted as Parsi. India launched a fertility subsidy program called Jiyo Parsi in 2013 specifically to slow the decline. Global counts are contested, with published estimates ranging from around 110,000 to well over 200,000 depending on whether Iranian figures and unaffiliated descendants are counted. Two arguments run inside the community. The first is acceptance: whether converts, spouses and the children of Parsi women married outside can be initiated, with Indian orthodoxy generally saying no and North American and Iranian associations often saying yes. The second is the calendar. Three reckonings remain in use, Shahanshahi, Kadmi and Fasli, which put the same festivals weeks apart, a split traceable to an eighteenth century quarrel over a missed intercalation and never resolved since.
What is the sugar in the milk story?
In the Qissa-i Sanjan the local ruler, Jadi Rana, sends the newly arrived Zoroastrians a vessel of milk filled to the brim, meaning his land is already full. Their leader stirs in sugar and returns it: the newcomers will sweeten the place without displacing anyone. Asylum is granted on conditions: local dress for women, the local language, weddings after dark, and no proselytizing. Parsis retell it as a founding charter.
What is the difference between Parsis and Irani Zoroastrians?
Timing of arrival, mostly. Parsis descend from the medieval migration to Gujarat and have spoken Gujarati for centuries. Iranis descend from Zoroastrians who left Iran for India far later, mainly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, escaping persecution and poverty around Yazd and Kerman; they arrived speaking Persian and settled largely in Bombay and Pune, where Irani cafes became a fixture. The two groups intermarry but keep distinct identities.
Why is the Parsi population declining?
Low fertility is the immediate cause. Parsi families in India have long married late, had few children, and included a large share who never married, and the community is unusually urban and highly educated, a profile associated with small families everywhere. Emigration removes young adults from the count. Rules excluding the children of women who marry outside the community remove more. Those effects compound across each generation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Zoroastrianism the world's oldest monotheistic religion?
Often claimed, rarely provable. If Zarathustra lived in the second millennium BCE, as the language of the Gathas suggests, then his religion predates any other surviving faith organized around a single supreme god. If the traditional date of the sixth century BCE is correct, the development of Jewish monotheism is roughly contemporary. The Egyptian cult of the Aten under Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE is earlier still, but it was abandoned within a few years of his death, when his successors restored the old gods and set about erasing his name. Zoroastrian dualism complicates the label further, so careful writers say oldest surviving faith and leave it there.
Can you convert to Zoroastrianism if you were not born into it?
It depends entirely on which community you approach, and the disagreement is bitter. Indian Parsi orthodoxy holds that the religion passes by descent, traditionally through the father, and does not accept converts; the Bombay Parsi Punchayet has defended that position, and priests who initiate outsiders have faced sanction. Iranian Zoroastrian bodies and many associations in North America, Europe and Australia do accept converts and perform the sedreh pushi initiation for them. Reformists point out that the Gathas address anyone who chooses, and that conversion clearly happened under the Sasanians.
Were the three wise men of the Nativity Zoroastrian priests?
Matthew's gospel says magoi came from the east, and magos was the Greek word for the Iranian priestly class, so the connection is real without being established. Matthew gives no number, no names and no country of origin. Three is an inference from three gifts, and the names Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar belong to later Western tradition rather than to the gospel, appearing in Latin sources centuries after Matthew was written. Syriac tradition counts twelve magi instead. Star watching fits a Babylonian astrological setting at least as well as a specifically Zoroastrian one, and by the first century magos was used loosely for eastern diviners of many kinds.
What is the Faravahar, the winged symbol Zoroastrians wear?
The Faravahar is the winged disc with a man's upper body rising from it, carved on Achaemenid monuments at Persepolis and Behistun and now worn as a pendant by Zoroastrians and by Iranians of every religion. What it originally represented is disputed. The candidates are the fravashi or guardian spirit, the khvarenah, meaning the divine glory attached to legitimate kingship, and Ahura Mazda himself. The name Faravahar and the emblem's use as a badge of identity are modern, spreading through the twentieth century, and the figure appears in no Avestan text.
Is Nowruz a Zoroastrian festival or simply a Persian one?
Both, and the two are difficult to separate. Nowruz falls at the spring equinox, ranks among the holiest days of the Zoroastrian year, and is also kept as a secular new year by Iranians, Kurds, Afghans, Central Asians and others of any faith or none. The name does not appear in the Avesta, so its pre Islamic history has to be reconstructed from Sasanian and later sources. UNESCO added Nowruz to its intangible cultural heritage list in 2009, and the United Nations recognized an International Day of Nowruz in 2010; both listings were filed by a group of countries, not by any religious body.
Was Freddie Mercury a Zoroastrian?
Yes. He was born Farrokh Bulsara in 1946 in Zanzibar to Parsi Zoroastrian parents from Gujarat, and his father worked for the British colonial administration there. He went through the navjote initiation as a boy and was schooled for several years in India before the family moved to England in 1964. He rarely discussed the religion in public and never presented himself as observant. After his death in 1991 a Zoroastrian priest conducted the funeral service at West London Crematorium, although cremation itself departs from traditional Zoroastrian handling of the dead.
What happened to Zoroastrianism after the Arab conquest of Persia?
It went from state religion to a taxed and tolerated minority, then shrank across centuries. Sasanian armies lost at Qadisiyya and Nahavand in the 630s and 640s, and the last king, Yazdegerd III, was killed in 651. Zoroastrians were treated as protected subjects paying the jizya tax, so conversion was gradual, and Iran probably did not become majority Muslim until the tenth or eleventh century. Some families migrated to Gujarat. The jizya on Iranian Zoroastrians was lifted only in 1882, after lobbying by Parsi philanthropists in India.
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