Zoroastrianism: Zarathustra, the Avesta, the sacred fire and the Parsi community

IA quick read in five sentences

One, the religion worships Ahura Mazda, meaning the Wise Lord, and teaches that evil does not come from Ahura Mazda. Two, the core of the teaching is the choice between asha, truth and order, and druj, the lie, summed up in three precepts: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Three, fire is the symbol of truth and the point towards which followers turn their hearts in prayer, not the supreme deity. Four, the religion's scripture is the Avesta, within which the seventeen chapters of the Gathas are professed to be the words of Zarathustra himself. Five, the religion lives on through the Parsis of India, the Zoroastrians of Iran and a diaspora, while in Vietnam it has no organised presence.

This page has fifteen sections and is written descriptively. The library reports what the religion professes and what history can verify, and keeps the two apart in two separate kinds of box. With this religion the disagreements between sources are far more numerous than usual: the dates of Zarathustra, the year the Parsis reached India, the extent of the religion's influence on later religions, and even the number of followers. Wherever the sources disagree, the page records every hypothesis along with the name of the person who proposed it. The ancient Persian empires are described only as religious background. Avestan terms are given only in Latin transliteration, because few fonts can display the Avestan script and the library has not yet checked every stroke.

IIThe ancient Indo-Iranian world

To understand Zoroastrianism one has to go back to a population that linguists call the Indo-Iranians: groups speaking closely related languages, living by herding, sharing one pantheon and one system of offerings centred on fire and on a sacred pressed juice. During the second millennium BCE this population split into two branches. One moved down into the Indian subcontinent and left behind the Rigveda, the other spread across the Iranian plateau and left behind the Avesta. The Old Avestan of the Gathas is so close to Vedic Sanskrit that many lines can be read across from one to the other by applying a few sound-change rules, and that very closeness is one of the grounds for estimating Zarathustra's dates.

The first two rows of the table are the most discussed: the Iranian side exalted ahura and set aside daeva, while the Indian side later exalted deva and pushed asura down to the ranks of the adversaries. One theory sees this as the trace of a religious split between groups, another holds that it happened slowly and separately on each side. No theory has yet won wide acceptance.

IIIZarathustra and the question of his dates

This page does not describe Zarathustra's appearance and does not suggest any portrait, because every familiar image of him was imagined by later generations. His name in Avestan is Zarathushtra. The Greeks wrote it Ζωροάστρης, transliterated Zoroastres, and modern Persian writes زرتشت, transliterated Zartosht. The second part of the name, ushtra, is the word for camel, so the name is often understood as one who owns camels. It is the name of a man from a herding society, not the name of a mythical figure.

Six hypotheses on his dates

IVThree thousand years on a timeline

The first date varies by as much as a thousand years, and events of the ancient Persian empires are included only where they bear on religion.

• around 1500 to 600 BCEZarathustra and the Gathas
  A range covering every scholarly hypothesis set out in the section above.
• 550 to 330 BCEThe Achaemenid period
  Royal inscriptions name Ahuramazda many times, most famously the Behistun inscription of King Darius I from around 520. The inscriptions do not name Zarathustra, so whether these kings followed his religion is still debated.
• mid-5th century BCEHerodotus describes Persian worship
  The Persians set up no statues, built no temples and made offerings on mountain tops, while the Magi priests left the bodies of the dead to birds and dogs before burial.
• 224 to 651The Sasanian period
  The priesthood was tightly organised. The high priest Kartir left inscriptions in the 3rd century. The Avestan script was devised around the 5th to 6th century to write down scriptures that had been transmitted only orally, and the canon was divided into twenty-one books called nask.
• 7th to 10th centuryIran gradually turns to Islam
  After the end of the Sasanian dynasty, the population converted gradually over several centuries. The priests composed the great Pahlavi books such as the Denkard and the Bundahishn to preserve the teaching.
• 716, 785 or 936The Parsis reach Sanjan
  Three years have all been proposed, depending on how one counts back from a text written in 1599.
• 1323The oldest surviving Avesta manuscript
  Every surviving copy of the Avesta is later than this year.
• 1478 to 1773The Rivayat letters
  The Parsis sent letters to the priests of Iran asking about law and ritual, and twenty-six letters of reply became a major source of religious law.
• 1742The Iranshah fire comes to Udvada
  The fire of the highest grade brought from Sanjan, after being moved many times, was installed at Udvada, in the state of Gujarat, where it remains today.
• 1771The first European translation of the Avesta
  The French scholar Anquetil-Duperron published a translation after years of study with Parsi priests in Surat.
• 1862Martin Haug and the Gathas
  The German scholar Martin Haug argued that the Gathas were the words of Zarathustra himself and read them in a monotheistic sense, strongly influencing the reform movement among the Parsis.
• late 19th to early 20th centuryThe Iranis come to India
  A wave of followers from Yazd and Kerman moved to Bombay and became the Irani community.
• 2009Nowruz on the UNESCO list
  Nowruz was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as the shared heritage of many peoples.

VThe Avesta, the Gathas and the Pahlavi books

For more than a thousand years, the scriptures of Zoroastrianism lived only in memory among the priesthood, recited by heart in ritual and passed from teacher to pupil. Only in the Sasanian period was a dedicated script devised, with a separate sign for every sound, to write them down. Because the scriptures were kept by mouth, great weight was placed on exact pronunciation: to mispronounce a sound was to spoil the ritual.

The Gathas, five hymns in seventeen chapters

The Gathas are the oldest and most difficult part of the Avesta, made up of five hymns in five metres: Ahunavaiti, seven chapters from 28 to 34, Ushtavaiti, four chapters from 43 to 46, Spenta Mainyu, four chapters from 47 to 50, Vohu Khshathra, which is chapter 51, and Vahishta Ishti, which is chapter 53. The language is so compressed that translations of the same passage can differ beyond recognition, so this page paraphrases the meaning rather than quoting any translation. The Gathas contain no narratives and no detailed laws, only prayers, questions and teachings about truth, about the two spirits and about human choice.

The Pahlavi books

Beyond the Avesta there is a body of books in Pahlavi, that is Middle Persian, most of them completed in the 9th and 10th centuries: the Denkard, an encyclopaedia of doctrine and law, the Bundahishn, which tells of creation and the end of time, and the Arda Viraf Namag, the story of a priest who visits the world beyond death. Much of what is commonly said about the religion, such as the sequence of events at the end of the world or the cosmic cycles, is told in full in the Pahlavi books rather than in the Gathas. Those books preserve traditions older than themselves, but they were themselves written late, and that is the crux of the debate over the religion's influence mentioned in the last section.

VICore teachings

The teaching can be reduced to one sentence: the world was created by a wholly good being, evil is an intruder, and every human being is called to choose for themselves to stand on the side of truth. This section goes through each concept in that order, and makes clear which concepts are already present in the Gathas and which are fully developed only in the late Pahlavi books.

Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord

Ahura means lord, from the same root as the Sanskrit asura. Mazda means wisdom. In the Gathas the two words stand apart and change places quite freely, and only later fused into a single proper name, which wore down in Middle Persian into Ohrmazd. The religion has no statues of Ahura Mazda, and fire temples hold no image of the Wise Lord.

The two spirits and the freedom to choose

The most quoted passage of the Gathas is in chapter 30 of the Yasna, and speaks of two primal spirits, one choosing truth and life, the other choosing the lie, adding that the wise choose rightly and the foolish wrongly. The good spirit was later called Spenta Mainyu, the Holy Spirit. The evil spirit is Angra Mainyu, the Destructive Spirit, which became Ahriman in Middle Persian.

The key word is choose. Evil is described as the result of a choice rather than as fate, and human beings face that very same choice. No one is born destined to be bad, and no one is excused from responsibility for what they do. Many researchers regard this idea of free will as the most distinctive feature of the religion.

Asha and druj, truth and the lie

Asha is hard to translate because it combines three things that the Vietnamese language keeps separate: natural order, like seasons arriving in their season, moral rightness, like keeping one's word and telling the truth, and the correctness of ritual. In this way of thinking, a person who lies does not merely commit a private fault but disturbs the order of the whole world. Herodotus recorded that the Persians taught their sons to ride, to shoot the bow and to speak the truth, and regarded lying as the most shameful of things.

Three precepts: good thoughts, good words, good deeds

If followers were to remember just one phrase, it would be humata, hukhta, hvarshta: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. These three words demand no lofty spiritual discipline, but rather consistency between the three levels of a person. Children recite a pledge to these three in the initiation ceremony, and in everyday life, work, honesty in trade and helping the poor are all understood as ways of contributing to the side of truth.

The six Amesha Spentas

Amesha Spenta means the Holy Immortals. In the Gathas they appear as qualities of Ahura Mazda and also as qualities that human beings can attain. In the Younger Avesta and the Pahlavi books, each one protects a part of the created world, and this association explains why the religion places such importance on keeping earth, water, fire and plants clean. The seventh creation is humankind, placed under the protection of Spenta Mainyu or of Ahura Mazda himself.

The yazatas

Yazata means one worthy of worship, a broad rank of sacred beings below Ahura Mazda, many of them rooted in the old Indo-Iranian pantheon. The most often mentioned are Mithra, guardian of covenants and oaths, Anahita, associated with water, Sraosha, protector of the soul, Tishtrya, the star that brings rain, and Atar, which is fire. Each day of the Zoroastrian calendar bears the name of a yazata or an Amesha Spenta. The yazatas are praised in the hymns called Yashts but do not stand level with Ahura Mazda.

The material world is good

Because the world was created by Ahura Mazda, it is good by nature, while sickness, filth and death are intrusions from outside. As a result the religion does not exalt asceticism, does not exalt celibacy and does not encourage fasting or mortification of the body. Marrying, having children, farming and honest trade are all good works. From the same idea comes a whole system of purity laws: to defile earth, water or fire is to stand on the side of evil, and the laws on corpses, on waste and on keeping fire clean all follow from that idea.

After death: the Chinvat Bridge

According to the teaching, the realm of punishment is not eternal. It lasts only until the day the world is made new, when every soul is purified, so the final goal is the restoration of all rather than a separation that lasts forever.

Frashokereti, the day the world is made new

Frashokereti means the making fresh, the day evil is driven out of the world for good. The Gathas already speak of making the world fresh as a goal to which human beings contribute. The Pahlavi books tell it in far more detail: the saviours called Saoshyant appear, the dead rise, a river of molten metal flows across the world to purify it, the righteous find it as warm as milk, and then Angra Mainyu is destroyed. According to tradition, the history of the world lasts twelve thousand years divided into four cycles, and Zarathustra appears at the start of the final cycle, the very time frame the Greeks probably misunderstood.

Fravashi and Faravahar

The fravashi is the spiritual part that exists before a person is born and remains after death, both a part of the righteous person and a protector of that person. According to tradition, the fravashis of the ancestors come back to visit their descendants in the last days of the year, the origin of the ten days of Muktad before the New Year, a way of remembering the ancestors with something in common with the Vietnamese death anniversary rites but within an entirely different doctrinal framework.

From that word comes the name Faravahar, a winged symbol on reliefs of the Achaemenid period and today the international symbol of the religion. What it represents is not agreed: some take it to be Ahura Mazda, some a fravashi, some khvarenah, the sacred radiance of kingship. Most Parsis today understand it as a fravashi.

One god or two

One side stresses that Ahura Mazda is the sole creator and calls the religion monotheistic. The other stresses that evil has its own source and calls the religion dualistic. The usual reconciliation is monotheistic in the object of worship and dualistic in ethics, with two forces that are not equal and a conflict that has an end. In the Sasanian period there was a Zurvanite tendency, which made infinite Time the source of both Ohrmazd and Ahriman as twin brothers. That tendency was later set aside and no longer has any followers.

VIIThe sacred fire and the fire temple

Fire is what outsiders notice first and also what they misunderstand most. Followers pray facing a source of light: the sun by day, the moon, a lamp at home or the fire in the temple. Fire is the purest creation and the symbol of asha. In Parsi homes a small oil lamp called a divo is kept burning in the prayer corner.

Three grades of fire

The nine fires of the highest grade

There are nine Atash Behram temples in the world. Eight are in India: Udvada since 1742, Navsari since 1765, two in Surat both established in 1823, and four in Mumbai established in 1783, 1830, 1845 and 1897. The ninth is in Yazd, central Iran, in a building erected in 1934, and keeps a fire that community tradition says has burned without interruption since around 470, a figure for which the library has not found independent verification. Counting all three grades, according to 2021 figures cited by many sources, there are about 167 fire temples in the world: 45 in Mumbai, 105 elsewhere in India and 17 in other countries. Persian calls a fire temple آتشکده, transliterated âtashkade, the house of fire, while the Parsis call an ordinary-grade temple an agiary.

Iranshah, the fire from Sanjan

The fire at Udvada is called Iranshah, king of Iran, and is the most revered fire for the Parsis. According to tradition, the first migrants established it at Sanjan, so its founding date varies exactly as the dates of the migration vary. The fire was moved many times, into the Bahrot caves, to Vansda, to Navsari for more than three hundred years, and then in 1742 to Udvada. The present temple was built in 1742 and substantially renovated in 1894.

Inside a fire temple

The fire rests in a large metal vessel that the Parsis call an afarganyu, on a stone base, in a separate chamber. In Parsi tradition, sunlight must not fall directly into the fire chamber. The priests wear white and cover their mouths with a cloth called a padan so that their breath does not touch the fire, and at the start of each period of the day they perform the boi ceremony, offering sandalwood, reciting prayers and ringing a bell. Worshippers bring sandalwood, pray before the fire and then touch a little of the sacred ash to their foreheads. In India, by community custom, non-Zoroastrians may not enter the areas from which the fire can be seen. Some temples in Iran, such as the one in Yazd, let visitors view the fire through a glass wall.

VIIIRituals, calendars and festivals

Religious life turns on three rhythms: the rhythm of a lifetime, opened by initiation and closed by the funeral, the rhythm of a day, divided into five prayer periods, and the rhythm of a year, with the New Year, six seasonal festivals and ten days of remembering the ancestors. Funerals are left to the next section.

Initiation: the sudreh shirt and the kusti cord

The Parsis call the initiation ceremony Navjote and Iranians call it Sedreh-pushi. It is performed for children usually between seven and fifteen years of age, depending on the community. The child takes a purifying bath and puts on a thin white undershirt called the sudreh, and then the priest ties the kusti cord around the child's waist while the child recites the pledge. The sudreh has a small pocket at the neck, explained as a pocket for holding good deeds. The kusti is woven from seventy-two threads of lamb's wool, corresponding to the seventy-two chapters of the Yasna, and wound three times around the body, corresponding to the three good precepts. Followers untie and retie the kusti several times a day with a short prayer, and wear the sudreh and kusti all their lives.

Five periods, purity and the priesthood

The day is divided into five periods called gah: Havan from dawn to noon, Rapithwin from noon to about three in the afternoon, Uzerin until sunset, Aiwisruthrem until midnight, and Ushahin until dawn. The purity laws have several levels, from padyab, washing the face, hands and feet before prayer, and nahn, a full bath before major occasions, to bareshnum, lasting nine nights, which a priest must undergo before performing rituals inside the temple.

By tradition the priesthood is hereditary. One who has passed the first ordination is called an ervad, mobed is the general term for a priest, and dastur is a senior priest who heads a major temple or a community. In some diaspora communities, opening ritual roles to people outside priestly families and to women is under discussion.

The Yasna and the Jashan

The most important ritual in doctrinal terms is the Yasna, performed by two priests in a purified area of the temple: they recite all seventy-two chapters of the Yasna, pound haoma twigs to make the offering liquid, and hold the barsom bundle, once made of twigs and now usually of metal rods. The ritual lay people meet most often is the Jashan, a ceremony of thanksgiving and blessing on joyful and sorrowful occasions in family and community life, in which priests sit around the fire vessel, set out fruit, milk and water, and recite the Afrinagan prayers.

Three calendars

The Zoroastrian calendar has twelve months of thirty days plus five Gatha days at the end of the year, with each day and each month named after an Amesha Spenta or a yazata. The old calendar had no leap day, so every four years it drifted one day against the seasons. As a result the Parsis are divided among three calendars: the Shahenshahi, followed by the majority, the Kadmi, followed by a group in Surat since 1745 and one month apart from the Shahenshahi, and the Fasli, created in the early 20th century, which adds a leap day to fix the New Year at the spring equinox. The result is that the New Year of most Parsis, following the Shahenshahi calendar, currently falls in August of the Gregorian calendar.

Nowruz, Gahambar and Muktad

Nowruz, written نوروز in Persian, means new day. Besides the New Year of their own calendar, many Parsis also keep Jamshedi Navroz at the spring equinox, around 21 March. Khordad Sal celebrates the traditional birthday of Zarathustra. Iran also has Sadeh, a great bonfire festival in midwinter. The six seasonal Gahambar festivals, each lasting five days, are occasions for the whole community to eat together, each one corresponding to one of the creations. At the end of the year come the ten days of Muktad, when families set out flowers, recite prayers and welcome the fravashis of the ancestors home.

IXThe tower of silence and funeral rites

Funeral custom is the part that most surprises outsiders and also the part that must be written about most carefully. The Vietnamese name tháp im lặng translates the English name Tower of Silence, which many reference works say was coined in 1832 by a translator working for the British authorities in Bombay. The name within the religion is dakhma, written دخمه in Persian.

The deceased is washed, dressed in the sudreh and girded with the kusti. A priest recites prayers alongside, and a dog is brought to look at the deceased, a rite called sagdid, because by tradition a dog's gaze drives away nasu. The specialised corpse-bearers, called nasasalar, walk in pairs, the funeral procession also walks in pairs, and from the gate of the tower only the bearers may go further. The family recites prayers for three days, and at dawn on the fourth day performs the Chaharom ceremony, at the very moment the soul reaches the Chinvat Bridge. The tower is a circular walled structure on high ground, its floor divided into three rings for men, women and children, with a central pit to collect the bones, and rainwater passes through a filter of sand and charcoal before seeping out.

Recent changes

In Iran, from the early 20th century, the community gradually abandoned the towers in favour of burial in cement-lined graves, so that the body still does not touch the earth directly, and the old towers at Yazd and Kerman now survive only as monuments. In India the towers are still used, but vulture numbers had fallen by more than ninety-seven percent by 2008, mainly because the birds fed on the carcasses of livestock treated with the veterinary drug diclofenac from the 1990s onwards. The community has tried installing mirrors that concentrate sunlight on the towers, and some Parsis now choose cremation or burial. This is a discussion still under way within the community.

XParsis, Iranis and the paths of dispersal

The religion lives on through two communities with two different histories. One is made up of those who stayed in Iran after the country gradually turned to Islam, concentrated in Yazd and Kerman on the edge of the central desert. The other is made up of those who went to western India, called Parsis, meaning people of Pars, written પારસી in Gujarati.

Parsis and Iranis

For many centuries the Parsis lived in the coastal towns of Gujarat such as Sanjan, Navsari and Surat, spoke Gujarati as their mother tongue, and kept sending letters to Iran asking about law and ritual. From the 17th and 18th centuries many families moved to Bombay, now Mumbai, which became the largest centre of the community. Parsis were prominent in trade, shipbuilding, education and medicine, and founded many hospitals, schools and housing estates through charitable trusts, a practice they themselves see as a way of living by the three good precepts.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries another group of followers came from Yazd and Kerman to India, called Iranis to distinguish them from the Parsis who had arrived a thousand years earlier. The two groups share a religion and temples, but differ in language, in some customs and in calendar. In 1854 Manekji Limji Hataria was sent by a fund of the Bombay Parsis to help the community in Iran open schools and repair temples, restoring the link between the two branches.

To China, and out into the diaspora

Along the Silk Road, mainly through Sogdian merchants, the religion once reached China. Chinese texts of the Tang dynasty call it 祆教, read in Sino-Vietnamese as Hiên Giáo, and there were once temples of the religion in Chang'an and Luoyang. From the mid-9th century, along with other foreign religions, it lost its foothold in China.

From the 19th century, Parsis followed the trade routes to Aden, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. The first Parsi recorded in Singapore dates from 1827, and the community association there was founded in 1954 and now has more than two hundred and fifty members. In the second half of the 20th century, both Parsis and Zoroastrians from Iran emigrated in large numbers to North America, Britain and Australia, and in the diaspora the two branches often share temples and associations.

XIGroups within the religion and how it is organised

The religion is not divided into sects that stand wholly apart. The groupings run along several cross-cutting lines: history of migration, calendar, way of reading scripture, and views on accepting newcomers. A Parsi in Mumbai may at the same time follow the Shahenshahi calendar, keep to the traditional way in ritual and be open-minded on questions of marriage.

Traditionalists, reformists and the question of newcomers

From the mid-19th century, after Martin Haug argued that the Gathas were the words of Zarathustra himself, a reformist movement took shape among the Parsis, taking the Gathas as the standard and regarding part of the Vendidad law and many rituals as later additions. The traditionalist current regards the whole Avesta and the ritual system as a single inseparable whole. In the early 20th century Ilm-e Khshnoom appeared, founded by Behramshah Shroff in Bombay, reading scripture in an esoteric way and keeping ritual even more strictly than the traditionalists.

The question of newcomers is the most heated debate, and the library records only the positions. In the traditional Parsi view, a person is a Parsi if their father is a Parsi and they have undergone the Navjote, and the religion does not accept converts. Some diaspora associations, especially in North America, are more open. One side stresses preserving a community that has kept the religion for more than a thousand years, the other stresses that the Gathas speak to all people.

No central church

The religion has no common head and no body that makes decisions for all followers. Each major temple has its own dastur. Common affairs are handled by local councils, which the Parsis call anjuman or panchayat, of which the Bombay Parsi Panchayat is the oldest and largest, managing many charitable trusts, housing estates and the tower of silence grounds in Mumbai. In North America there is the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America, founded in 1987.

XIINumber of followers today

The most widely cited compiled source is the demographic survey of the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America, compiled by Roshan Rivetna and published in the FEZANA Journal in 2013 with 2012 figures: a worldwide total of 111,691 or 121,962 people, depending on which figure is taken for Iran. The compiler herself notes that this is a magazine-style survey based on figures from coordinators, not a standard statistical census. Pew Research Center does not count this religion separately but includes it in the group of other religions.

Two discrepancies need to be stated plainly. For India, the 2011 census counted 57,264 Parsis, while the 2012 FEZANA survey gives about 61,000. For Iran, FEZANA gives two figures more than ten thousand apart, while the 2016 census gives 23,109. All sources show the number of Parsis in India falling from census to census, from 91,266 in 1971 to 69,601 in 2001 and then 57,264 in 2011, while the number of followers abroad has risen.

Why every figure is an estimate

Counting faces four difficulties. First, the community is too small for global sample surveys to separate it out. Second, many countries do not ask about religion in their censuses, so the figures for the United States or Britain can only be drawn from membership lists, and anyone who has not joined an association is not counted. Third, who counts as a follower differs from place to place: in the traditional Parsi view converts are not counted, while some diaspora associations do count them. Fourth, self-identification and belonging to the community are two different things. Some online surveys with self-selected respondents produce much higher rates of self-declared attachment to the religion than census figures, and the researcher Michael Stausberg, in an article published in 2023, noted that those figures reflect self-identification rather than the number of people belonging to the community of followers.

XIIIIn Vietnam, and the name Bái Hỏa

To be direct: Zoroastrianism has no organised presence in Vietnam. The religion does not appear on the list of religions recognised or granted registration for activities attached to Official Letter 6955/BNV-TGCP of the Ministry of Home Affairs, dated 28 December 2020. Nor has the library found any reliable source recording a community of followers, a fire temple or an association of the religion on Vietnamese soil, including the colonial period when Indians came to Sài Gòn to do business. For that reason this page gives no figure for followers in Vietnam.

How the name entered Vietnamese

The name came by way of Chinese characters. Chinese texts of the Tang dynasty call the religion 祆教, read in Sino-Vietnamese as Hiên Giáo, and the Sino-Vietnamese dictionary of Trần Văn Chánh glosses this character as Bái Hỏa Giáo, the fire-god religion of ancient Persia. The name 拜火教, Bái Hỏa Giáo, describes what outsiders saw, literally the religion of bowing to fire, and because it is easy to understand it became the most common name in Vietnamese books. The library keeps this name because it is the one readers search for most, but it should be said plainly that it is misleading. Following the way followers name themselves, the more accurate term is the worship of Mazda.

Where Vietnamese readers can encounter this religion

The nearest place with an active community is Singapore, where Parsis have been present since 1827. Further away are Mumbai and the towns of Gujarat, home to eight of the world's nine Atash Behram temples. Remember the rule of the community in India: non-Zoroastrians may not enter the areas holding the sacred fire, so visitors usually see the temples only from outside.

XIVThrough the eyes of feng shui

Facing the light, not the compass

Unlike mosques, which face Mecca, or older Catholic churches, which faced east, Zoroastrians have no required geographical direction. The rule is to pray facing a source of light: towards the sun in the east in the morning, towards the west in the afternoon, and at night towards the moon, a lamp or a fire. In a temple, the direction of the worshipper is set by the position of the fire chamber. The fire chamber in Parsi temples usually lies deep inside, with thick walls, no direct sunlight and a smoke vent above. The dakhma is placed on high ground, far from dwellings and from water sources as the Vendidad prescribes. All three rules come from the doctrine of purity, not from any method of reading the land.

Fire in the five phases and the fire of Zoroastrianism

Those familiar with feng shui will immediately think of the Fire phase. In the five phases, Fire is one of the five phases of qi, standing within the cycle of generation and control: Wood generates Fire, Fire generates Earth, Water controls Fire. No phase is higher than another, and the merit of a site lies in balance. In Zoroastrianism, fire stands in no cycle. It is a pure creation bound to truth, kept so that it never goes out and is never defiled. Where the two come close is in everyday life: the Vietnamese of old tended the kitchen fire, took care not to defile the hearth and lit lamps on the altar, while Parsis keep the divo lamp in the prayer corner and regard the family hearth as a fire to be kept clean.

Yin dwellings: two ways of thinking in opposite directions

The clearest point of comparison is the placing of the dead. Vietnamese feng shui of the yin dwelling seeks for the departed a burial spot that shelters from the wind and gathers water, so that the remains lie at peace in the earth receiving auspicious qi, and in traditional belief that qi brings blessings down to the descendants. Zoroastrianism goes in exactly the opposite direction: the body must be kept from touching the earth, laid on an open floor under the sun rather than in a grave sheltered from the wind. Both traditions treat the relationship between the dead and the earth as a weighty matter, both choose the place with great care, and both have many days of prayer afterwards, yet they arrive at opposite conclusions. Two systems of rules can be equally rigorous without being translatable into each other.

Three layers distinguished

The first layer, what the religion teaches. Pray facing a source of light, keep the fire pure, place the towers on high ground far from water and from dwellings. There is no provision about dragon veins or the builder's age. The second layer, what builders did in response to climate. Zoroastrian temples and houses in Yazd are built of mud brick with thick walls and wind towers for cooling, because that is how people live on the edge of the desert, while Parsi temples in Mumbai carry features of colonial and Gujarati architecture. The third layer, the library's interpretation. A dakhma on a high hill, with a mountain at its back and far from settlements, is, in the traditional reading, a high, dry and airy site. But that resemblance is a coincidence between two ways of thinking that both observe land and water, not a teaching of the religion.

XVCommon misunderstandings

This last section gathers the questions the library meets most often when outsiders ask about Zoroastrianism. The biggest slip comes from the Vietnamese name itself, followed by confusing this religion with Minh Giáo, mistaking a disputed symbol for an image of God, mistaking a literary character for the founder, and drawing hasty conclusions about the religion's influence on later religions.

?Quick Questions

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