All young Parsis must be initiated when they reach the age of seven (in India) or 10 (in Persia). They receive the shirt (sadre) and the girdle (kusti), which they are to wear their whole life.
Zoroastrian youth ceremonyZoroastrian priests in a Parsi community perform a ceremony initiating young members into the religion.© Tim Page/Corbis
There are three types of purification, in order of increasing importance: the padyab, or ablution; the nahn, or bath; and the bareshnum, a complicated ritual performed at special places with the participation of a dog—whose left ear is touched by the candidate and whose gaze puts the evil spirits to flight—and lasting several days.
Penance entails reciting the patet, the firm resolve not to sin again, and the confession of sins to a dastūr or to an ordinary priest if a dastūr is not obtainable.
The chief ceremony, the Yasna, essentially a sacrifice of haoma (the sacred liquor), is celebrated before the sacred fire with recitation of large parts of the Avesta. There also are offerings of bread and milk and, formerly, of meat or animal fat.
The sacred fire must be kept burning continually and has to be fed at least five times a day. Prayers also are recited five times a day. The founding of a new fire involves a very elaborate ceremony. There are also rites for purification and for regeneration of a fire. Burial rites
After death, a dog is brought before the corpse; it should preferably be a “four-eyed” dog (i.e., it should have a spot above each eye, as this is said to increase the efficacy of its look). The rite is repeated five times a day. After the first one, fire is brought into the room where it is kept burning until three days after the removal of the corpse to the dakhma, or “tower of silence.” The removal must be done during the daytime.
The interior of the dakhma is built in three concentric circles, one each for men, women, and children. The corpses are exposed there naked. The vultures do not take long—an hour or two at the most—to strip the flesh off the bones, and these, dried by the sun, are later swept into the central well. Formerly the bones were kept in an ossuary, the astodān, to preserve them from rain and animals. The morning of the fourth day is marked by the most solemn observance in the death ritual, for it is then that the departed soul reaches the next world and appears before the deities who are to pass judgment over it.
dakhmaDakhma in Yazd, Iran.Maziart
Festivals
Festivals, in which worship is an essential part, are characteristic aspects of Zoroastrianism, a faith that enjoins on human beings the pleasant duty of being happy. The principal festivals in the Parsi year are the six seasonal festivals, Gahānbārs, and the days in memory of the dead at year’s end. Also, each day of the month and each of the 12 months of the year is dedicated to a deity. The day named after the month is the great feast day of that particular deity.
The New Year festival, Nōrūz, is the most joyous and beautiful of Zoroastrian feasts, a spring festival in honour of Rapithwin, the personification of noonday and summer. The festival to Mithra, or Mehragān, was traditionally an autumn one, as honoured as the spring feast of Nōrūz. Ethics
The precepts of Mazdean ethics focus upon the maintenance of life and the fight against evil. In order to maintain life, one must earn one’s living by means of cattle raising and agriculture, and one must procreate. To fight against evil is to combat the demons and whatever beings, human or animal, belong to them. The two points of view seem to coincide, considering that the forces of evil are the forces of death: good is opposed to evil as light is to darkness, as life is to nonlife. The life precepts can be transposed into fight precepts; for instance, eating and drinking are interpreted by Zātspram as a struggle against the she-demon Āz, “Concupiscence.” The two points of view, however, are also contradictory: how can one fight the forces of evil without suppressing certain lives, such as baleful animals? The second viewpoint prevails: Iran ignores, even in theory, the universal respect of life that is preached by Buddhism or that justifies the vegetarian diet of Brahmanic India.
Social reasons (e.g., the desire to maintain family privileges) apparently explain the development of consanguineous marriage, an acute form of endogamy.
Future life should be determined by the balance of the good and evil deeds, words, and thoughts of the whole life. This principle, however, is tempered to allow for human weakness. All faults do not have to be registered or weighed forever on the scales. There are two means of effacing them: confession and the transfer of supererogatory merits (the equivalent of the Roman Catholic “Treasury of Merits” of Christ and the saints). The latter is the justification for the prayers and ceremonies for the departed. Iconography
There is no Zoroastrian art. Be it in the Achaemenid, Arsacid, or Sāsānian period, Iranian art was predominantly royal. Only one god is represented during the first period: Auramazda, as a winged disk hovering above the king. It is known, however, that Artaxerxes II introduced statues of Anahita into her temples, after the Greek fashion. In the Arsacid period, Greek models also served for the representations of Iranian gods ordered by the kings on reliefs or coins. In the Sāsānian period, deities were represented only in the giving of the royal investiture, as is the case with Ormazd and Anahita at Naqsh-e Rostam, or Ormazd and Mithra at Taq-e Bostan. The frequency of the bullman in Achaemenid and Sāsānid iconography may be due to the obviously royal character of this personage: on seals he wears a crown, and the Pahlavi text calls him Gopatshāh, “King of Gopat.” Relation to other religions
The debt of Israel to its Eastern neighbours in religious matters is easy to demonstrate on a few precise points of minor importance but less so in other more important points, such as dualism, angelology, and eschatology.
Chapters 40 through 48 of the Book of Isaiah offer striking parallels with the third and fourth verses of Gāthā 44. Besides the common procedure of rhetorical questions, there is the notion of a god who has created the world and, notably, light and darkness. The very idea of a creator god may be common to all of the western part of the Semitic world. But the notion that God created light and darkness appears in both prophets. It is true that Zarathustra associates light and darkness only to waking and sleep and that no Iranian text says that God created good and evil. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition, in the Book of Isaiah, of light–darkness with good–evil sounds remarkably Iranian.