Zoroastrianism

What it is

The religion founded on the teaching of Zarathustra — Zoroaster in Greek — centred on a single creator God, Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord, and on a cosmic struggle between truth and the lie.

Its structure:

Aṣ̌a — truth, order, righteousness, the way things properly are — against druj, the lie, disorder, deceit. Every person is a participant in that conflict, and the ethical demand is correspondingly direct.

Good thoughts, good words, good deeds — humata, hūxta, huvarshta — the tradition's summary of its own ethics, and about as compact a moral programme as any religion has produced.

Free choice. Human beings are not pawns; they choose a side, and the choice matters to the outcome of the cosmic contest.

Fire is the symbol of purity and of the divine presence, maintained in temples. Zoroastrians are not fire-worshippers, a misidentification as old as Greek writers and as current as modern reference books.

Where it came from

Zarathustra's date is genuinely uncertain. Linguistic analysis of the Gāthās — seventeen hymns attributed to him personally, in an archaic language close to Vedic Sanskrit — suggests composition somewhere around 1200–1000 BCE, considerably earlier than the traditional sixth-century dating.

If that is right, Zarathustra may be the earliest named religious founder whose own words survive.

The religion became the faith of three Persian empires — Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian — over more than a thousand years, and was therefore the state religion of the dominant power of the ancient Near East during precisely the period in which Judaism was taking its formative post-exilic shape.

And that is the claim that makes this small religion enormously consequential.

Ideas that are marginal or absent in the earliest Hebrew scriptures and prominent afterwards include: a developed angelology; a personalised adversary figure; individual judgement after death; a final resurrection; a coming saviour; and a cosmic dualism of good and evil forces heading toward resolution.

All of these are Zoroastrian doctrines, present in the tradition before the Jewish exile in Babylon and the subsequent Persian period, during which Cyrus permitted the return and rebuilding.

Scholars disagree substantially about the extent and mechanism of the influence, and the dating problems on both sides are real. But the broad proposition — that Zoroastrianism contributed significantly to the eschatology of Judaism, and through it to Christianity and Islam — is widely held, and it means that a religion now numbering perhaps 130,000 people shaped the afterlife beliefs of over half the world.

After the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, the religion declined under pressure and taxation. A community migrated to Gujarat, becoming the Parsis.

How it is practised

Through prayer at fixed times, often before a fire or a source of light; the wearing of the sudreh and kusti, a sacred shirt and cord, tied and untied with prayers during the day; purity observances; seasonal festivals including Nowruz, the new year at the spring equinox, which is now celebrated across much of Central and Western Asia by people of every religion.

Funerary practice is the most distinctive element and the subject of a genuinely modern crisis. Because corpses are held to be impure and must not pollute earth, fire or water, the traditional practice was exposure in a dakhma, a tower of silence, where vultures consumed the remains.

In India that practice has been severely disrupted by an ecological catastrophe: the collapse of South Asian vulture populations from the 1990s, caused by the veterinary drug diclofenac, which killed more than ninety per cent of several species. With no vultures, the towers do not work. Parsi communities have responded with solar concentrators, aviaries and, increasingly, cremation or burial — a religious practice ended by pharmacology.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the influence claim is serious and mainstream, if debated in its details, and that it is almost entirely unknown outside specialist circles.

We can say the community is in demographic crisis, and openly discusses it. Numbers are variously estimated between about 110,000 and 200,000. Parsi practice has traditionally not accepted converts, and the children of Parsi women who marry outside the community have often not been recognised — while the children of Parsi men have. The result is a shrinking population and a live internal argument about whether the rules that preserved the community are now ending it.

We cannot say what Zarathustra taught with precision. The Gāthās are difficult, the language is archaic and imperfectly understood, and translations diverge sharply.

Further reading

• Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1979) — the standard work.
• Jenny Rose, Zoroastrianism: An Introduction (2011).
• The Gāthās, in a scholarly translation, read knowing how uncertain the reading is.