Full text of "A Persian Stronghold of Zoroastrianism"

ft* A PERSIAN STRONGHOLD OF ZOROASTRIANISM based on the Ratanbai Katrak lectures, 1975 MARY BOYCE J OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1977. 0*/on/ University Press, Walton Street, Oxford oxz 6dp OXFORD LONDON GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON CAPETOWN TSADAN NAIROBI DAR ES SALAAM LUSAKA ADDIS ABABA KUALA LUMPUR SINGAPORE JAKARTA HONGKONG TOKYO DELHI BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI © Oxford University Press 1977 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Boyce, Mary A Persian Stronghold of Zoroastrianism - (Ratanbai Katrak Lectures; 1975) 1. Religious life (Zoroastrianism) I. Title n. Series 295'.4'0955 BL1525 ISBN O-I9-82653I-X Dedicated to Agha Rust am Noshiravan Belivani and his wife Khanom Tahmina Mundagar Abadian H:* NOV 6 1978 Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Oxford by Vivian Ridler Printer to the University PREFACE The present work is based on six lectures given in 1975 in the series of Ratanbai Katrak lectures founded at Oxford in memory of his wife by the late Dr. Nanabhai Navroji Katrak. I am indebted to the Electors for inviting me to give these lectures, and to the Oxford University Press for allowing me to expand them for publication. Even with this concession, much necessarily remains still unrecorded which I learnt from the Zoroastrians of Sharifabad-e Ardekan, a little village at the northern end of the Yazdi plain. While on leave from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, I spent twelve months in Iran during 1963-4, and most of this time I was able to pass in Sharifabad, thanks to the great kindness and hospitality of Agha Rustam Noshiravan Belivani and his wife Tahmina Khanom. To them and to their children I owe. the warmest debt of gratitude. I was shown much helpfulness too by their relatives and friends, and by the Zoroastrian villagers at large, who received an unexpected stranger in their midst with truly remarkable tolerance and kindness. Since what I learnt of the Sharifabadis was so striking and admirable, I trust that the following pages will constitute both a faithful record of what they taught me, and at the same time a tribute to them themselves. My gratitude is due also to Khanom Ferangis Shahrokh, to whom I turned on arrival in Tehran. Apart from sacrificing her own time on my behalf there, she kindly gave me an introduction to Arbab Jamshid Sorushian of Kerman, who, with his wife Humayun Khanom, has shown so much hospitality to European visitors to Iran, patiently helping them to understand something of his own community. Through Humayun Khanom I was received into the home of her brother, Arbab Faridun Kayanian of Yazd, and I am grateful to him and his family for allowing me to impose upon their kindness for several weeks. At their house I met Shehriar Zohrabi of Mazra< Kalantar, one of their tenant farmers, who at their prompt- ing hospitably invited me to his village for the festival of Mihragan. From Mazra< I visited neighbouring Sharifabad, and there I was privileged to remain. My first hosts in the city of Yazd were a Moslem family, that of _2_ viii PREFACE the late Agha Abbas Mohitpour, who not only sheltered me initially (there were no hotels then in Yazd), but showed me thereafter un- stinting kindness and friendship, despite my entire preoccupation with Zoroastrian affairs. It is a cause of keen regret to me that it is impossible to write about the Zoroastrians of Yazd without casting the Moslems in the role of villains, just as it is impossible to write an account of Jews in Europe without showing Christians in a hateful light. Under the present Pahlavi dynasty the Zoroastrians of Iran have come to share the rights of citizenship equally with their Moslem fellow countrymen. The community has prospered, and individual Zoroastrians have attained high position; but in the old centres of Kerman and Yazd local prejudice, deep-rooted, dies hard, and in 1964 the Zoroastrians there still suffered local pressures and disadvantages. In the following decade there were many changes, with the Tehrani community growing steadily in numbers at the expense of the older ones. As the Zoroastrian population of Yazd and its villages dwindled, it became more vulnerable to the forces of change, and new developments brought shocks to young and old alike, as well as creating fresh perspectives and opportunities. Nevertheless, so strong is tradition in Sharifabad that in 1975 Agha Rustam was able to assure me that nothing described in this book had funda- mentally changed. Since my stay in the village I have published a number of articles containing matter derived from what I learnt there. These are cited in the footnotes simply by a shortened title, without author's name, and full references are given in the bibliography at the end of the book. A problem in the body of the work has been to attain con- sistency in proper names and technical terms between forms in standard Persian and in 'Dari' (the Zoroastrian dialect). In general the former have been preferred, as more widely familiar, but the Dari ones are often given also, either in the text or following the Persian ones in the index, and occasionally, for religious technical terms, they are the only ones available. It has proved impossible to avoid some inconsistencies, however. Thus, for example, the archaic form 'Ardvahist' has been used for the name of the divinity, but the current 'Urdibehist' for the month devoted to him. As is illustrated by these two words, the letter 's' has been used as a convenient sign in both Persian and Dari words for the sound rendered by *sh* in place-names (such as Shiraz) and in modern personal names; and 'c' is similarly employed for 'ch'. In general the Yazdis prefer the PREFACE a sound *p' to 'f ', and though they would write 'Faridun', 'Faramarz', they say 'Paridun', 'Palamarz'; and, having come to know in- dividuals by these latter forms, I have used them here, together with 'Erdeshir' rather than 'Ardashir', and other small variants on standard written usage. For convenience the Greek letters y and '8' have been employed very occasionally to avoid the clumsiness of 'gh' and 'dh' in rendering a voiced guttural or a dental fricative in Dari or Avestan words. For simplicity's sake, the length of vowels in Persian or Dari words is marked only at their first occurrence, and in the index. As to the writing of personal names, some use has been made here of the Persian izafe, a linking particle which is never written in the Arabic script. In spoken Persian this particle is used to join all proper names, whether given or family ones. Fixed surnames came into existence in Iran, by government decree, only this century, and were still not much used by the villagers among themselves, so that I did not always learn them. So by a convention, in the following pages a given name followed by a surname is written without the particle, e.g. Bahram Khademi, whereas One followed by the father's name (the old way of identification) is joined to it by the particle, e.g. Rustam-e Bahram. Nicknames were the commonest way of distinguishing people, and one middle-aged man was known as Rustam-e Tehrani, because as a boy in the 1930s he had lived briefly at the capital, being one of the first Sharifabadis to visit that then - remote place. This nickname in itself showed the enormous changes that had taken place in three decades, for already by 1964 there was frequent coming and going between the village and Tehran, and the easy mobility of a motorized age was beginning to affect the lives of its inhabitants. I am grateful to Dr. Michael Fischer of Harvard University (who himself worked as an anthropologist in Yazd in 1970 and 1 971) for kindly sparing time to read a set of proofs, and to make helpful comments. I am also indebted to the Oxford University Press for their courtesy, thoroughness, and impressive skill. CONTENTS list of plates page xlii ABBREVIATIONS XV 1. The Village of the Two ^Cathedral' Fires i 2. The Worship of Ohrmazd and the Creations 29 3. Some Individual Rites of Piety and Charity 53 4. Sacred Fires and Empty Shrines 68 5. The Laws and Rites of Purity 92 6. Death and the Mysteries of the Dog 139 7. The Spring New Year and the Hundredth-Day Feast 164 8. Some Rites of Expiation or Comfort for the Living and the Dead 186 9. The Festivals of All Souls and the Religious New Year 212 10. Initiations and Pilgrimages 236 BIBLIOGRAPHY 27I INDEX 275 LIST OF PLATES facing page I a The moment of the first congregational response during an Afrinagan-e Gahambar. b Piruza, Agha Rustam's second daughter, giving the com-e swa. 48 Ua Banu of Mazra< Kalantar about to eat melon during no-swa. b Piruza-e Dinyar giving Hajji Khodabakhsh a drink of water during no-swa. III a D. Khodadad making the libation to water in a garden ^ at Hasanabad. b Part of the company at the evem'ng meal eaten by the dakhma at the Dadgah-e Tir-Mah. IV a A group of Panji figurines on the Belivani roof, with wind- towers in the background. b Tahmina Khanom preparing a spice-jar for Havzoru. V a D. Khodadad solemnizing the Visperad at Havzoru in the "\ Dastur's House. b Pari dun Rashidi with the y order in to be consecrated during the Visperad. VI a Zari Rashidi (Paridun's aunt) receiving the parahom from Parizad, D. Khodadad's elder daughter. b Sarvar from Aliabad, wife of Turk Jamshidi, weaving a kosti 49 80 81 144 145 VII a Sedra-pusun at the boys' school. » b Sedra-pusun in the Dastur's House by D. Khodadad for his 1 184 niece Pourandukht, Agha Rustam's third daughter. J VIII a A sacrificial procession up the stairway to Pir-e Hrist during \ the spring pilgrimage. b Women gathered on the terrace of Pir-e Hri§t during a l85 communal Afrinagan service within the shrine. ABBREVIATIONS Note: for abbreviated titles of books which follow an author's name see under that name in the bibliography. AMI Archaeologische MUteilungen aus Iran Bd. Bundahisn BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies D. Dastur (general courtesy title for a Zoroastrian priest) JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Riv. Rivdyats (see under Dhabhar, B. N., and Unvala, M. R. in the bibliography) RSO Rivista degli Studi Orientali !§ns. Sayest ne-sayest Vd. Vendidad VDI Vestnik Drevnei Istorii Y. Yasna Yt. YaSt 1 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES It is now generally agreed that the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century a.d. was not achieved by a few great battles, but took more than a generation to accomplish; and that, although Islam was established thereby as the state religion, it needed some three hundred years, or nine generations, for it to become the dominant faith throughout the land. During this time the Zoro- astrians continued to look for leadership to their high priest, the Dastur dasturan, hereditary successor to the prelate who in the days of the Sasanian Empire had been head of the established church. For two or three centuries after the conquest the Dastur dasturan continued to be a person of dignity and influence; but late in the ninth century the tide began to ebb swiftly for the Zoroastrians, with Islam now enjoying the full support of temporal power every- where. It was then that the founding fathers of the Parsi community left their homeland to seek religious freedom in exile in India; 1 and thereafter those who held by their ancient faith in Iran were steadily ground down into the position of a small, deprived, and harassed minority, lacking all privileges or consideration. The only two places where Zoroastrians succeeded in maintaining themselves in any numbers were in and around Yazd and Kerman. These are oasis cities in the very centre of Iran, surrounded by mountain and desert, and far from frontiers or royal courts. The narrow, enclosed plain of Yazd (a little over thirty miles in length) 'lies on the skirts of the land of Pars', 2 that is, on the northern edge of the old kingdom of Persia proper, the homeland of the Sasanians; and it was there that the Dastur dasturan sought refuge when life grew too dangerous and oppressive in Pars itself. The region was hardly one to attract Arab settlers, for the climate is harsh, with 1 After a sojourn in Div, these migrants appear to have landed at Sanjan in Gujarat in a.d. 936, see S. H. Hodivala, Studies in Parsi History, 67-73. 2 Riv., ed. Unvala, ii. 452, transl. Dhabhar, 614. 2 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES burning summers and searingly cold winters; and since the rainfall is scanty, the plain is partly desert— in some places glittering white with salt, in others covered by shifting, engulfing sands. Much of the rest is now rough shingle or parched earth, after years of drought; but in earlier times these areas probably bore thickets of wild pistachio, tamarisk, and other trees, which would have sheltered beasts of prey and have helped to isolate the oasis villages. These are scattered about the plain, set either by natural springs, or at the end of long underground channels (gemots) which bring water to them from the surrounding hills. The ground slopes gently down from north-west to south-east; and in the south-eastern corner, which as the lowest point has the best supply of water, stands the city of Yazd. This, like the other cities of Iran, must have been early seized and garrisoned by the Arab conquerors; but probably the villages of the inhospitable plain were long left more or less to themselves — which is presumably why the Dastur dasturan sought shelter there. The particular place which he made his abode was known by the fourteenth century (when it first appears in records) as Turkabad. It is in the north-western corner of the plain— as far as possible, that is, from Yazd itself, the centre of local government. It is, on the other hand, near a famous and probably ancient Zoroastrian mountain shrine. 3 Both these facts may well have had a part in determining the high priest's choice of this spot as refuge, together doubtless with the existence there of staunch and resolute Zoro- astrians, who had the courage to receive him to live among them. Just to the south of Turkabad is a village long known as Sharif- abad; and it must have been when the Dastur dasturan came to Turkabad that two great sacred fires were brought to this neighbour- ing place, where they were housed humbly in small mud-brick buildings indistinguishable from ordinary rustic homes. Both fires were Atas Bahrams, which are as it were the cathedral fires of Zoroastrianism; and one of them is known to the villagers as A5or Khara. This is a dialect form of Adur Farnbag, which was the name of one of the three chief sacred fires of ancient Iran. Before the down- fall of the Sasanians Adur Farnbag was established on a hill in Pars. 4 It is recorded that after the conquest its priests made desperate 3 i.e. the shrine of Banu-Pars, see below, pp. 248-55. 4 For the literature on this fire and its site see K. Schippmann, Die iranischen Feuerheitigtiimer, 86-94. 1° early Moslem times the ancient fire was called (by dialect variations) either ASur Farra or ASur Khwarra. The latter form would have developed naturally in due course into Khara. THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 3 efforts to save it from extinction, even dividing its embers and keep- ing them as two fires in different places; 5 and it seems that in the end one group followed the high priest to his chosen haven, bringing their fire to burn in safe obscurity in Sharifabad. 6 This in itself must have been a startling honour for so small a place; but the honour was compounded, for yet another Atas Bahrain was established there, which down the centuries the villagers held in even greater reverence and esteem. This fire they knew simply as the Atas Bahram; and since there was only one such fire that could have meant more to Persians than Adur Farnbag, it seems that this must be the ancient sacred fire of Istakhr, which had been under the special care of the Sasanian royal house, and doubtless after its downfall remained the particular charge of the Dastur dasturan. Its former magnificent temple is known to have been despoiled and in ruins by the ninth century, 7 and its priests probably found various refuges for it before bringing it also to this remote and undistinguished haven, close to the abode of the high priest. The priests who carried these two sacred fires to Sharifabad evidently settled there to continue tending them; and the two small villages of Turkabad and Sharifabad became thereafter the ecclesi- astical centre of Irani Zoroastriamsm. It was evidently of them that the Frenchman Chardin had heard tell in the seventeenth century, when he wrote of the Zoroastrians: 8 'Their principal temple is near Yazd . . . This is their great fire-temple . . . and also their oracle and academy. It is there that they communicate their religion, their maxims, and their hopes. Their high pontiff lives there always, and without quitting it. He is called the Dastur dasturan. This pontiff s See MasOidi, Prairies d'or, §1402 (ed. Ch." Pellat, Paris, 1965, ii. 540-1); Ibn al-Faqih, Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum, v. 246, transl. P. Schwartz, Iran im Mittelalter nach den arabischen Geographen, i. 91. 6 This suggestion was earlier made by the present writer in the Burton Memorial Lecture given at the Royal Asiatic Society in 1973. 7 See MasOidi, op. cit., § 1403. 8 See his Voyages en Perse et autres lieux de VOrient, Amsterdam, 1735, ii. 183. Chardin further locates this 'principal temple' as being 'in a mountain 18 leagues' from Yazd. These 'leagues' would be French ones, 24 miles in length, which makes a reckoning of 9-10 miles further than between Sharifabad and Yazd by the present highway; but the old highway ran along the other side of the plain, and allowing for a rough reckoning of farsakhs, then turned into leagues, the discrepancy does not seem significant. Admittedly neither Turkabad nor Sharifabad are 'in the mountains', but they are near mountain shrines. It is quite possible, moreover, that Chardin's informants (in Isfahan) had no wish to give him too precise a description of the temple's whereabouts. 4 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES has with him several priests and several students who form a kind of seminary. The Mahometans allow it because it is inconspicuous, and generous presents are made to them.' These last words show that the Zoroastrian community must have loyally supported their high priest, so that he had the means to secure safety through bribes; and probably during those obscure centuries many of the old religion made pilgrimages, on foot and donkeyback, to Sharifabad and Turkabad, and gave offerings to maintain both the college of priests and the great sacred fires. 9 It seems probable that the Dastur dasturan took refuge in Turkabad not later than the eleventh century, by which time con- ditions had become generally harsh for his community; but the first evidence for his residence there comes in a.d. 1478. It was then that the Parsis of India, seeking authority on certain matters of observance, sent back the first of a series of messengers to the mother country to make contact with their co-religionists there. These messengers continued to come at irregular intervals from then until towards the end of the seventeenth century, and they returned to India with letters, treatises of instruction, and sometimes manu- scripts. 10 Colophons of these manuscripts show that they were written in Turkabad or Sharifabad; 11 and the signatures of the accompanying letters (which are preserved by the Parsis) prove that throughout these centuries the Dastur dasturan, the acknowledged head of the Irani community, 12 had his residence in Turkabad. 9 A French traveller who visited Yazd in the early nineteenth century, after the Dastur dasturan had removed there (see below), wrote of the Zoroastrians: 'Pilgrimage to Yazd is a strict obligation, and none among them can dispense with making it at least once in his life. They then bring presents to the high priest' (Gaspard Drouville, Voyage en Perse fait en 1812 et 1813, 3rd edn., ii. 210). 10 For a list of the treatises of instruction, called rivdyats, with their dates, see B. B. Patel, *A brief outline of some controversial questions that led to the study of religious literature among the Parsis', K. R. Cama Mem. Vol. (ed. J. J. Modi), Bombay, 1900, 1 73-4 ; and for a critical scrutiny of the dates see Hodivala, Studies, 276-349. 11 Among the priestly copyists from these two villages were the well-known scribe Mihraban Noshiravan Rustam Shehriar, himself Dastur dasturan towards the end of the seventeenth century, and his brother Khosrow, who identified himself in a colophon as being 'of Turkabad in the province of Yazd'-. On these and the other scribes see further Boyce, History, vol. iii (in preparation). Three 'dynasties' of high priests, holding office from father to son, can be traced from the end of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. x * Kerman had its own Dastur dasturan, and in the nineteenth century the two prelates appear to have been on a footing of equality and independence. Even in the earlier period some Parsi messengers went direct to Kerman, and THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 5 One letter has the signature of twenty-eight priests from Turkabad and Sharifabad. 13 Leading laymen also signed these letters 14 — descendants presumably of those small landowners and peasant farmers who had had the courage to receive the high priest and the sacred fires in the beginning. A letter of 1510 gives the number of Zoroastrians in the two villages as four hundred, a figure which seems to refer to the heads of households and leading men only. IS The last letter to bear the signature of a high priest living in Turkabad is dated to 168 1 16 — about half a century after Chardin wrote his account. Some time during the next hundred years the Dastur dasturan removed from there to the city of Yazd, where the holder of this office was found residing by travellers in the late eigh- teenth century, and where he continued to live thereafter. There is no record of exactly when, still less why, the move was made; but given the deep tenacity of the Zoroastrians, and their reluctance to introduce change, the likelihood seems that the Moslem authorities decided that they wanted the leader of the Zoroastrian community more directly under surveillance. His priests went with him, and from then on it was Yazd which was the ecclesiastical centre for the Zoroastrians of the region, and a priests' quarter, the Mahalle-ye Dasturan, grew up there beside the older one inhabited by the laity'. 17 brought back letters signed only by Kermani priests; but every letter which went round the whole Irani community for signature was signed first by the Dastur dasturan of Yazd, and then by other priests of Turkabad and Sharifabad. The Dastur dasturan of Yazd was not only regularly accorded precedence, but was referred to as the 'Great Dastur' {dastur-e cazani). 13 i.e. the letter accompanying the Rivayat of Kamdin Shapur (a.d. 1558), see Hodivala, Studies, 315-16. 14 e.g. the Rivayat of a.d. 1 511, see Hodivala, Studies, 294. 15 This is how the figure was interpreted by E. W. West, Sir J. J. Madressa Jubilee Vol., Bombay, 1914, 445. » See Hodivala, Studies, 339-40. ^ I7 The letter of a.d. 151 i bears the signatures of twenty-one laymen from the city of Yazd, but not one of a priest, although the community there numbered then some 500 persons (i.e. heads of households). After the Dastur dasturan went to Yazd, almost all the priests of the area seem also to have established then- permanent homes in the city, and thereafter it was from there that they went to the villages for limited periods in rotation (the various hu§ts or parishes being re- distributed at intervals by lot). There were, however, exceptions. Thus one priestly family kept their fixed abode in Mobareke, having (according to their own tradition) come to this tiny village from Isfahan in the seventeenth century at the time when the Safavid Shah Husayn was persecuting the Zoroastrians; and there they continued to live, the priests for four generations going into Yazd (no great distance) for the gahambars and all other collegia! priestly activities. D. Khodadad Neryosangi remembered the last of them, D. Kai Khosrow, well. [After writing the above I learnt in London in 1976 of a living 6 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES After this, Sharifabad and Turkabad were served, like any other villages, simply by 'hust-mobeds' (that is, parish priests), appointed for a period by the Dastur dasturan in Yazd. Down to the beginning of the present century there were priests enough for several to work together in a village, each looking after the families in one particular lane or lanes. The two great fires, the oldest in the whole Zoroastrian community, remained, however, probably for safety's sake, in their humble shrines in Sharifabad. To Moslems one fire is like another, and probably the authorities took no special cognizance of these. 18 Devotion to the fires continued to be deep and sustained in the village, although early in the twentieth century, because of the difficulties of maintaining both fittingly, they were united to burn as one in the temple of the greater Atas Bahram. The name of ASor Khara was not forgotten, but no tradition of the history of the fires survived, although it was remembered that Turkabad had been a famous 'dastur-nisln', that is, a dwelling-place of priests. Such gaps in tradition are less surprising than it may at first sight seem. Even in the days of their temporal power Zoroastrians tended not to dwell overmuch on mundane events, having their concern rather with eternal things; and in Islamic times, although their priests maintained a modicum of traditional learning, the laity, hard-pressed to earn a livelihood, were in general illiterate — as indeed were most of the Moslem population around them. Two or three hundred years is a long stretch of time when there are no written records to prompt the memory, and when poverty and persecution tend to concentrate thought on present struggles. The sojourn of the priests among them left the Sharifabadis an inheritance of a deeply in- grained and well-instructed orthodoxy, which was kept alive by constant observances; but the history of the fires which they so faithfully tended passed into oblivion. tradition of the removal of the Dastur dasturan and his priests from Turkabad to Yazd. Mr. Shehriar Yadgar Bekhradnia, formerly of Jarfarabad, told me that he had heard of it as a small boy in the 1920s from his grandfather, Jamshid-e Bahram-e Shirmardan, then a centenarian. No date, naturally, attached to the tradition.] 18 It appears that the present AtaS Bahram of Yazd was installed there in the 1790s with the help of a pious Parsi of Surat, Seth Nassarwanji Kohyari (see B. B. Patel, Parsi Prakds, vol. i, Bombay, i960, 83 n., 876 n.; and further Dara M. Meherji-Rana, Dastiiran-dastur Meherji-Rana Yadgari Granth. Bombay, 1947, i. 457-60). (For knowledge of these Gujarati sources I am indebted to my friend Dastur Firoze M. Kotwal.) THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 7 Virtually nothing can be learnt of Sharifabad and Turkabad during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; but in the mid nineteenth century disaster overtook Turkabad, in the shape of what was perhaps the last massed forcible conversion in Iran. It no longer seems possible to learn anything about the background of this event; but it happened, so it is said, one autumn day when dye-madder — then one of the chief local crops — was being lifted. All the able-bodied men were at work in teams in the fields when a body of Moslems swooped on the village and seized them. They were threatened, not only with death for themselves, but also with the horrors that would befall their women and children, who were being terrorized at the same time in their homes; and by the end of a day of violence most of the village had accepted Islam. To recant after a verbal acknowledgement of Allah and his prophet meant death in those days, and so Turkabad was lost to the old religion. Its fire-temple was razed to the ground, and only a rough, empty enclosure remained where once it had stood. A similar fate must have overtaken many Iranian villages in the past, among those which did not willingly embrace Islam; and the question seems less why it happened to Turkabad than why it did not overwhelm all other Zoroastrian settlements. The evidence, scanty though it is, shows, however, that the harassment of the Zoroastrians of Yazd tended to be erratic and capricious, being at times less harsh, or bridled by strong governors; and in general the advance of Islam across the plain, though relentless, seems to have been more by slow erosion than by furious force. The process was still going on in the 1960s, and one could see, therefore, how it took effect. Either a few Moslems settled on the outskirts of a Zoroastrian village, or one or two Zoroastrian families adopted Islam. Once the dominant faith had made a breach, it pressed in remorselessly, like a rising tide. More Moslems came, and soon a small mosque was built, which attracted yet others. As long as the Zoroastrians remained in the majority, their lives were tolerable; but once the Moslems became the more numerous, a petty but pervasive harassment was apt to develop. This was partly verbal, with taunts about fire-worship, and comments on how few Zoroast- rians there were in the world, and how many Moslems, who must therefore possess the truth; and also on how many material ad- vantages lay with Islam. The harassment was often also physical; boys fought, and gangs of youths waylaid and bullied individual 8 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES Zoroastrians. They also diverted themselves by climbing into the local tower of silence and desecrating it, and they might even break into the fire-temple and seek to pollute or extinguish the sacred flame. Those with criminal leanings found too that a religious minority provided tempting opportunities for theft, pilfering from the open fields, and sometimes rape and arson. Those Zoroastrians who resisted all these pressures often preferred therefore in the end to sell out and move to some other place where their co-religionists were still relatively numerous, and they could live at peace; and so another village was lost to the old faith. Several of the leading families in Sharifabad had forebears who were driven away by intense Moslem pressure from Abshahi, once a very devout and orthodox village on the southern outskirts of Yazd; and a shorter migration had been made by the family of the centenarian 'HajjT Khodabakhsh, who had himself been born in the 1850s and was still alert and vigorous in 1964. His family, who were very pious, had left their home in Ahmedabad (just to the north of Turkabad) when he was a small boy, and had come to settle in Sharifabad to escape persecution and the threats to their orthodox way of life. Other Zoroastrians held out there for a few decades longer, but by the end of the century Ahmedabad was wholly Moslem, as Abshahi became in 1961. 19 It was noticeable that the villages which were left to the Zoroastrians were in the main those with poor supplies of water, where farming conditions were hard. Under the Pahlavi dynasty, which took power in 1925, the rule of law was fully extended to Zoroastrians, and the violence in Moslem pressures had almost disappeared by the 1960s; but other factors were then hastening the erosion of the Yazdi community, notably the attractions of Tehran, with its wide opportunities and relative freedom from religious strife and prejudice. The local Moslem population was swelling steadily in numbers (thanks largely to better medical care), and as Zoroastrians left for the capital there were always Moslem families eager to move into their old 19 A little fire-altar of solid stone was rescued from Ahmedabad by a group of young Sharifabadis (under the leadership of Noshiravan, Agha Rustam's father), who rolled it laboriously across the desert to the safety of their own village, where it now stands in the fire-temple. The last Zoroastrian family left Abshahi in j 961, after the rape and subsequent suicide of one of their daughters. Hajji Khodabaksh's own mother was of an Abshahi family. After her death his father married again, this time an Ahmedabadi bride, and through this marriage Khodabakhsh had a half-brother, Bahram Surkhabi (known as Bahram Skundari or 'Beetroot Bahram') who was some fifty years younger than himself. THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 9 homes, and this meant a steady infiltration of the dominant faith into Zoroastrian strongholds. At the end of the nineteenth century there were still a number of villages in the Yazdi plain which were wholly or almost wholly Zoroastrian, and there were Zoroastrians too in villages over the mountains to the north, around Biyabanak. The last left there early this century, 20 and by the mid 1960s, of the thirty-one villages in the Yazdi plain which still had Zoroastrians in them, not one was entirely Zoroastrian. In addition to the losses caused by migration or conversion to Islam, there were others due to the fact that (much to the sorrow and perplexity of the com- munity) relatively large numbers of Zoroastrians embraced Baha'ism, and many suffered accordingly in the terrible Baha'i massacres which took place in Yazd early this century. No Sharifabadis suc- cumbed to the proselytizing of the new faith, but even among them the growth of the Moslem population was rapid after the Second World War. At the beginning of the century there were only two or three Moslem families in the village, but by 1964 there were reckoned to be about a thousand Moslems to only some seven hundred Zoroastrians. 21 Two Husayniyas had been built, 22 and the call of the mu'azzin sounded loudly over the Zoroastrian quarter, which itself was being steadily penetrated by Moslems as Zoroastrian families sold up and left for Tehran. Naturally even in the Yazdi region, famed for its religious fervour, there were Moslems who were not particularly zealous, or burning to vex the unbeliever; and in some of the suburban villages the two communities lived tolerantly together. In the past too there had 20 The last Zoroastrians in Biyabanak, four brothers and a sister, tenant- farmers, left there in about 1900 to save the sister from the attentions of a local Moslem. They sought the protection of their Zoroastrian arbab (landowner) in Yazd; and he sent one of them, Isfandiyar, to act as his agent in developing the then tiny hamlet of Hasanabad-e Maybod (see further below). He was still living there, in his eighties, in 1964. 21 In 1976 the figures were 455 Zoroastrians and 510 Moslems, the drop in the population representing movement to the cities (information from Agha Rustam). " Such places of worship are found in most Moslem villages of the Yazdi region. The older one in Sharifabad was built at the end of the nineteenth century on ground between the village and the neighbouring town of Ardekan, which was the original area of Moslem settlement. The second one was built in the 1950s in the more recent settlement on the south side of the village, known to the Zoroastrians as the Skahr-e Lukhiha 'Town of the Naked', because of the numbers of impoverished Moslems who had crowded there. Zoroastrians had always to pass through one or other of these Moslem quarters to reach the high- way to Yazd, or Ardekan with its shops and secondary schools. 10 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES clearly been variations in the attitudes of Moslems towards the *gor* — the contemptuous term, a form of 'gabr' or unbeliever, used generally for a Zoroastrian — though condescension, as far as one can judge, was general. This, however, was social as much as religious, for the poverty of the down-trodden Zoroastrians was proverbial. 23 Since the region is not one to attract strangers, many of its inhabitants must be of Zoroastrian ancestry, and some devout Moslems there admit to a Zoroastrian forebear, sometimes as far back as the seventh generation. 24 Some conversions, enforced like those of Turkabad, or entered into with little spiritual con- viction, left the convert with affectionate and regretful thoughts towards his old faith, and the descendants of such a one were more likely to be mild, or at least just, in their dealings with Zoro- astrians than those of converts who embraced their new religion with fervour, and felt a corresponding zeal to stamp out the old one, and to harry those who clung to it. Fair or tolerant Moslems the Zoro- astrians called najib 'noble', the others nd~najtb 'ignoble', and such broad distinctions sometimes characterized whole communities. Thus the Sharifabadis were separated only by the highway from the town of Ardekan, whose inhabitants they regarded as markedly na-najib; and so they preferred to have all their dealings, as far as possible, with the kindly Moslems of Maybod on the further side of the plain, even though this involved them in far more exertion. Apart from such local divergences, there were naturally all the factors of individual temperament, education, and social position to affect Moslem attitudes towards a religious minority. In the past Zoroast- rians probably suffered most from gangs of roughs, the dreaded lutis (sometimes hired for the purpose by their betters), who were able to pillage, maltreat, or even murder non-Moslems with little fear of being brought to justice. Whatever the particular frictions of local history which led to the forced conversion of Turkabad in the nineteenth century, its neigh- bour Sharifabad was able to survive as a stronghold of Zoroastrian orthodoxy. The historical reasons for this orthodoxy are plain, and there were a number of factors which favoured its sturdy 23 'When the Muslims wish to describe a man as very poor, they say he is as poor as a Gabr': Drouville, Voyage en Perse, ii. 209, *+ Unless there were special circumstances (such as sayyid descent) the Moslems, like the Zoroastrians, seemed in general content to carry their ancestry back no further than seven generations — a fair spau for a predominantly oral tradition. THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 11 survival. To begin with, the Yazdis as a group were markedly conservative in comparison with the Zoroastrians of Kerman and Tehran, for reasons that were partly historic, partly geographical. The Tehrani community was relatively new, created by migrants from Kerman and Yazd over the previous hundred years or so; and since the 1930s it had had close contact with reforming Parsis in Bombay, as well as experiencing the modernizing influences of its own large cosmopolitan city. The Kermani community was as old as the Yazdi one, but was decimated in wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and being so reduced in numbers became less resistant to outside influences. Then geographically the whole Yazdi plain was until recently very isolated, except for the camel caravans which passed across it. It is difficult to realize, now that the progress of the 1970s has linked Yazd to Tehran by road, rail, and air, so that travel between the two places need be only a matter of hours, that up to the 1920s it could take as much as three dangerous, exhausting weeks to journey there from the capital. 23 Even to reach any of the nearest cities, Kerman, Shiraz, or Isfahan, was an eight-day journey, often fraught with peril; 26 and so Yazd remained 'insular beyond the insularity of islands', 27 with the world the other side of its mountains an unknown place for most of its inhabitants. Life there had changed little, in outlook, knowledge, or customs, since the Middle Ages, even for the Moslem majority, and within this remote, largely self-sufficient community the Zoroastrians were thrust into their own added isolation, especially in the further villages; and though even there they had to suffer the exactions of the tax-farmer, and erratic raids and tyrannies, for much of the time they were left alone in their poverty, and were able to follow a wholly traditional way of life. These circum- stances, however hard for individuals, were ideal for preserving unchanged ancient beliefs and practices. 25 Agha Sohrab Lohrasp, for many years headmaster of the Zoroastrian Marker School in Yazd, told me that this was the time the journey took by horse and carriage when he travelled from Tehran to Yazd to take up his appoint- ment in the early 1920s. He shared the carriage with seven others, four of whom died on the journey or soon after, too exhausted to survive the illnesses which they contracted on the way. 26 These local journeys could be dangerous to both health and wealth, thanks to brigands, and the sudden, fierce sandstorms of the region, which at their worst can damage sight or hearing irremediably. 27 Napier Malcolm, Five Years in a Persian Town, 36. This book gives a vivid account of the isolation of Yazd at the beginning of the twentieth century. 12 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES The separation of the Zoroastrians from the rest of the community was enforced as thoroughly as possible by the Moslem authorities. Thus the 'gors' were forbidden to take up crafts or professions which might bring them into contact with Moslems, and were in the main restricted to farming and labouring work. They had, moreover, to wear distinctive clothing, so that they could be instantly recognized and shunned. Traditionally Iranian peasants dressed in blue, 28 but Zoroastrian men were forbidden to wear this or any other colour, and had to have garments of undyed cotton or wool, with roughly tied headgear to mark their lowly state. Their women wore a modest but richly coloured costume which was probably that worn by village women before the Arab conquest; but they were clearly distinguished from their Moslem sisters by their refusal to veil their faces— a refusal which, since many of them were comely, needed courage to maintain. There were many stories, written and told, of the rape and abduction of Zoroastrian girls, and the oldest village women recalled how sometimes the prettiest among them would have to blacken their teeth and disfigure their faces with dirt before leaving their houses. In general, however, the Zoroastrian women made no concessions, and their dignified and open carriage, at home and abroad, was all the more striking in contrast with the shrouded, self-effacing bearing of their Moslem sisters. As for the men's clothing, the restrictions on it lasted into the twentieth century; and one of the Sharifabadi villagers 29 told me how, as a boy, he travelled to India in 19 13 with a group of Zoroastrians, who were asked in Shiraz (by a fine irony) if they were Arabs, because of their curious light-coloured clothes. When they explained that they were Zoroastrians they were surprised to evoke no scorn, but only a friendly interest, and a prophecy that when they returned from India they would, be wearing European dress. This, however, they could not safely have done in Yazd itself before the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty. Many other restrictions on those of the old religion were long enforced there, some only mildly vexing, others well calculated to make life more wretched and miserable. Thus, for example, they were not allowed to build the wind-towers which in summer caught what breezes there were and brought cool air down into the houses. Nor were they permitted to ride horses, but must 28 The continuity of usage in this respect as far as Moslem Iran is concerned has been pointed out by A. Tafazzoli, AMI, n.f. 7, 1974, 192-3. 29 Erdeshir Qudusi. THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 13 go even long distances at the donkey's plodding pace, and even then they were required to dismount if they met a Moslem. But all such harassments— and there were many 30 — were petty compared with the fact that neither their lives nor property were ever wholly safe, since the rule of law extended to them only haphazardly. The Zoroastrians for their part had no desire to fraternize with their oppressors; and they took a deliberate measure to secure for themselves a degree of protective isolation when they adopted a local dialect, incomprehensible to speakers of standard Persian, for their own use. This dialect the Sharifabadis called simply (when pressed to give it a name) gap-e vehdinan, 'the tongue of those of the Good Religion'. It is also, artificially but conveniently, now called 'Dari', on the wrong assumption that it is an ancient 'court' or learned' language. 31 'Dari' was once spoken by all Zoroastrians, priests and laity, in Yazd and Kerman. It was seldom written, and with the scattered nature of the community local differences in pronunciation developed, so that the Yazdi Zoroastrians could tell a man's village by his speech. By the middle of the twentieth century 'Dari' had almost died out in Kerman, where it was by then known only to members of the older generation; but it was still flourishing in 1964 in the Yazdi area, where Zoroastrians spoke nothing else among themselves— unless a Kermani were present. In Sharifabad there were then still a few old women who understood and spoke no Persian, but only 'Dari', having had no schooling and little contact with the outer world; and they were naturally admirable guardians of old traditions. The breaking-down of the isolation of the Irani Zoroastrians began in the mid nineteenth century, largely through the efforts of the Parsis, and of those Iranis who had managed to flee in secret to India (for the Zoroastrians were then forbidden to travel abroad). After a long and difficult campaign the annual poll-tax on Zoro- astrians— the chief instrument of extortion and abuse— was abolished in 1882; and Zoroastrians were permitted, moreover, to enter trades and professions. What made it possible for the community to take advantage of this concession was that Parsi benefactors (and 30 See Napier Malcolm, op. cit. 44 ff. 31 It is unfortunate that the first Europeans to study this dialect adopted for it the insulting Moslem term of 'Gabri'. On it see chiefly W. Ivanow, RSO xviii U939), 1-58, and Jamshid S. Sorushian, Farhang-e Behdinan, who gives the pronunciation of both Kerman and the city of Yazd. The forms given in the present work are all in the dialect of Sharifabad. A THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES Iranis who had settled in Bombay) gradually established, not only in Yazd and Kerman but in all the Zoroastrian villages, primary schools, where a basic Western-type education was given. And with schooling and new opportunities, the Iranis, a small, inbred, deprived community, defied genetic and social theory by breaking out with dazzling talents; and soon they were producing not only enormously wealthy and influential merchants but also (in proportion to their numbers) a host of able professional men — doctors, teachers, engineers. The parallelism with the history of the Parsis is striking; and how much is to be attributed to a sturdy heredity, how much to the religion which nurtured both communities, is a problem to ponder. The period that followed, from the late nineteenth century down to the Second World War, was in many ways a golden age for the Yazdi Zoroastrians. New education and ideas had not yet begun seriously to challenge old orthodoxies, and new wealth and in- fluence were put largely at the service of the faith. With relaxation of the restrictions which had prevented Zoroastrians erecting any but the humblest buildings, this period saw a great reconstruction of temples and shrines, as well as the endowment of religious charities. Yet though the new prosperity at first advanced the faith, the seeds of change were being sown. Many of the Zoroastrians who took up professions were the sons of priests, the traditional learned class; and as time went on, more and more joined the flight from an ancient, exacting calling that was wholly out of harmony with the contemporary world. In the 1930s there were still some two hundred priests in the city of Yazd; 32 by 1964 there were not ten. Moreover, those Yazdis who went out into the wider world and returned brought with them new knowledge and ideas, and so old beliefs and ways came to be challenged. Sharifabad, in its remote corner of the plain, shared to some ex- tent in these developments. It too received its school, and it too lost thereafter many of its ablest sons, first to Bombay and then to Tehran. Yet those who remained in the village were able to con- tinue very much in the old manner, and in a measure their reluctance to have truck with the modem world (which was necessarily a non- Zoroastrian one) was deliberate. They preferred the ways of their forefathers. Even as late as 1964 the impact of the outer world on the village was slight. There was a noticeable absence of men in their 3 * Information from D. Khodadad Neryosangi. THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 15 twenties and thirties, most of whom were away in Tehran; 33 but the pattern of living in Sharifabad itself was as yet barely affected, and mental perspectives were little changed. External communications were few, with no newspapers and only one or two radios, little used. No one entered a cinema or encountered television, and books were little read. Daily life continued to be laborious and hard, with crops being skilfully coaxed from a difficult soil by means of limited supplies of brackish water. 34 In the main it was subsistence farming, the two chief crops being corn and cotton, which of necessity (because of the soil conditions) were still sown and har- vested by hand. The wheel was virtually unused in the fields since it was difficult to get anything bigger than a bicycle over the irri- gation ditches, and so pack-animals — donkey, cow, and occasionally camel — still did most of the carrying and hauling. These animals were all stabled, as in the dangerous old days, inside the small, fortress-like houses, 35 which were huddled together for protection — • though the surrounding village-wall had long been demolished. Food was simple, basically wheaten bread with goat's milk cheese, mutton broth, and fruits and herbs in season (though this was luxurious compared with the basic diet of harsh rye bread and herbs which had sustained life for earlier generations). Plainness of diet was one, mundane, reason why religious festivals were eagerly looked forward to, since these meant a break in the monotony. In general religion dominated the villagers' lives, providing them not only with a purpose for living, and explanations for all pheno- mena, but also occupation (through innumerable observances) and diversions, with feast days and merrymaking. There were few aesthetic pleasures to be had, except from the beauties of nature, which were keenly and consciously enjoyed; and since these could be rejoiced in as the work of God, this delight itself could be brought within the framework of the faith. In the 1970s, material life in Iran was modernized with a rush, and the old isolation of Sharifabad was broken into as the means of transport and communication were speeded up. Some of the dusty lanes through the village were tarred, and cars dashed up and down them. Telephones were installed, radios became common, and 33 It was calculated that in 1964 fifty to sixty of those officially resident in the village were away, mostly working in Tehran, though a few still maintained older connections with Bombay. 3 * See in more detail 'Some aspects of farming', 121-40. 3S See The Zoroastrian houses of Yazd', 125-47. 16 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES oil- and gas-stoves began to replace the ever-burning wood-fires which had been so carefully tended in every Zoroastrian home. This decade saw in fact a major onslaught (all the more devastating for being unplanned and unmotivated) on the rhythms and habits of village life, and so, indirectly, on the age-old orthodoxy which they had helped to sustain. That the orthodoxy of Sharifabad truly represented that of ancient Zoroastrianism can be established from the scriptures of the faith (the Avesta); from its secondary literature in Pahlavi (dating in the final redactions largely from Sasanian and early Islamic times); and from sporadic notices by foreign writers in the past — Greek, Roman, Syrian, Armenian. Moreover, the beliefs and ways of the Yazdi Zoroastrians can be shown to be in the main identical with those of the Parsis before the latter came first under Western and then under modem Hindu influences. The essential tenets of the old orthodoxy were these: there is one uncreated God, Ohrmazd, who is wholly good, and the Creator of all good things. All worship is directed ultimately to him, although it may be addressed immediately to one of a number of lesser divi- nities, brought into being by him to help in his great task of van- quishing evil. These divinities are called yazad or Xzed 'One to be worshipped', or amahraspand 'Bounteous Immortal'. 36 Ohrmazd is opposed by Ahriman, the Hostile Spirit, also uncreated but wholly evil, who in his turn has his helpers, the demons, to aid him in attacking the good. Man's task in life is to fight, together with his Creator Ohrmazd and the Amahraspands, against Ahriman, by thinking, speaking, and doing well, by performing prescribed acts of worship, and by keeping the purity laws. By so doing he will both gain his own salvation at death, in paradise above, and help to achieve the ultimate salvation of the whole world, which will some day come about through the utter defeat of evil. These clear-cut and noble tenets can be readily grasped, and are imprinted on the mind of every Sharifabadi child, through precept and example. The complexity in Zoroastrian doctrine lies in the prophet's teachings about one group of the Amahraspands, six great beings who belong particularly to his own revelation. These six were apprehended by Zoroaster as the first divinities to be created by Ohrmazd; and their original concepts were subtle and profound. 36 The literal meanings of these ancient Ayestan words are naturally no longer understood. THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 27 Here we need concern ourselves only with the beliefs of the Sharif- abadis in modern times, which though simplified appear to embody still the core of the prophet's teachings. In brief, the six Amahra- spands are Vahman, the hypostasis of 'Good Purpose', of the will to achieve the good life; Ardvahist, 'Best Righteousness'; Shahrevar, Desired Dominion', who embodies just authority; Spendarmad Bounteous Devotion'; Hordad 'Health'; and Amurdad 'Long Life' or 'Immortality'. The meanings of the divinities' proper names were no longer understood; but it was firmly believed that if these six beings were duly reverenced, both in daily life and through acts of worship, they would sustain a man and endue him with virtue while also, like the other lesser Amahraspands, protecting and helping him in the vicissitudes of life. How these great beings were to be reverenced was inculcated in the orthodox from childhood; but in part the theological basis for observances is difficult at first for the outsider to grasp. To under- stand it one has to remember that Zoroaster lived a very long time ago, possibly about 1500 B.C. or even earlier; and that he was a learned man, a priest, familiar evidently with the scholastic specula- tions of his time and place, and deriving from them a basis for his own doctrines. These speculations incorporated, naturally, what is now an immensely archaic picture of the cosmos, one which belongs to the same stage of human development as, for instance, the Hebrew ideas about genesis. Thus the ancient Iranian philosophers thought that the world was divided into seven parts, which had been created successively. The first of these was the sky, which they held to be a hard shell or globe that passed beneath the earth as well as arching over it. This globe they apprehended as being of stone-a theory apparently generally held by the Indo-Europeans The second creation, water, they thought filled the lower part of this globe; and earth, the third, lay upon the water like a great flat dish. Then were made in turn the living creations of plants, animals, and man; and finally fire was fashioned, the seventh creation, which as well as existing in its own right also permeated all the rest, giving them warmth or energy. In the old pagan religion this sevenfold creation was probably attributed to the agency of various gods; but Zoroaster saw it as the planned and purposeful handiwork of the supreme Lord, Ohrmazd, helped by the six great Amahraspands whom he had first called into being, and who, with his own Creative Spirit, made up a mighty heptad. Each of these 826531X r> 18 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES seven, Zoroaster taught, 37 brought one of the seven creations into being, and remains its lord and protector. So Shahrevar, representing the kingdom of God, created the sky, closest to God's present king- dom of Paradise; Spendarmad, 'Devotion', fashioned the humble earth. Water belongs to Hordad, Health, plants to Amurdad, 'Immortality'. Vahman, 'Good Purpose', created beneficent animals and Ohrmazd himself, through his Spirit, made man, the chief of creations. Lastly Aidvahist, hypostasis of the order and right- fulness which should pervade all things, fashioned fire, which runs through all the physical world. This remarkable doctrine links the material with the immaterial, making the entire world in origin holy; and accordingly positive injunctions are laid on men to serve the seven great Amahraspands, both by pursuing the good life in ways which will be ethically pleasing to them, and also by cherishing the seven physical creations which they have made. Man, that is, must care both for his own moral and physical well-being, and also act as steward of the other six creations, which unlike him have not the power of conscious choice. Thus in one of the Pahlavi books Ohrmazd is represented as saying to his prophet Zoroaster; In that material world of mine, I who am Ohrmazd [preside] over the just man, and Vahman over cattle, ArdvahiSt over fire and Shahrevar over metals, Spendarmad over earth and virtuous women, Hordad over waters, and Amurdad over plants. Whoever teaches care for these seven [creations] does well and pleases [the Amahraspands]. Then his soul will never arrive at kinship with Ahriman and the devs. If he has cared for them, then he has cared for the seven Amahraspands, and this he must teach to all mankind. 38 In this passage Shahrevar is said to preside over metals. This is a development of scholastic theory whereby the substance of the sky was identified as rock-crystal and so classified as a metal, 39 pre- sumably because crystal was won from rock, like metallic ores. Shahrevar, lord of the sky, is therefore lord of metals also, and since, as it is said in another Zoroastrian treatise, 'no one can take hold of the sky, nor can anyone defile it', 40 it was only through caring 37 That these doctrines were expounded by the prophet himself has gradually been established by the labours of successive scholars, for a survey of which see Boyce, History, vol. i, chs. 8 and 9. 3* The Supplementary Texts to the Sayest ne-sdyest, ed. and trans! . by Firoze M. P. Kotwal, xv. 5-6. * 9 See H. W. Bailey, Zoroastrian problems in the ninth-century books, ch. iv. +° Saddar BundaheS, 75.1 (ed. Dhabhar, 146, transl. Dhabhar, 2&V. 556)- THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 19 for metals here below that man could serve this Amahraspand materially. This service was interpreted, among other ways, as being to use money wisely and well, not squandering it, but giving it generously in charity to the deserving poor. As for the other five creations, water and fire are to be kept undefiled, and earth is to be made fertile through careful husbandry. Plants are to be tended, and it is a sin, for instance, wantonly to destroy a tree. Animals must be kindly treated, and no domestic creatures should ever be overworked, underfed, or abused. This linking of the physical and moral has proved wonderfully effective in sustaining the general observance of a highly disciplined ethical code among Zoroastrians down the ages, and in Yazd the Moslems bore reluctant witness to the moral stature of the otherwise despised 'gor'. Thus they were very ready to employ Zoroastrians in field and garden, not only because of their skill and industriousness, but also because of their honesty; and there was a proverb among them that one should eat at the house of a Jew (to be well fed), but sleep at that of a Zoro- astrian (where one could trust one's hosts in all things). In such respects there was no difference between the Zoroastrians of town or village, Iran or India. The moral code of 'good thoughts, words and deeds' was the same for all. Yet there is no doubt that the full range of Zoroastrian commandments with regard to the seven creations remained at its most significant for those who worked on the land, thus following a pattern of life not so far removed from Zoroaster's own; and though the principles of these commandments could be applied also in urban life (and indeed accord in part most admirably with contemporary ideas of con- servation), it was certainly easier to maintain the old, coherent orthodoxy in a village like Sharifabad than in a complex modern city. Plainly if Zoroastrianism had survived as a state religion, with colleges of learned priests and an educated laity, the archaic doctrine of the seven creations would eventually have been reinterpreted, just as the Old Testament cosmogony has been reinterpreted by Jewish and Christian scholars, and would have come to provide a symbolic basis for belief and practice; but since the Zoroastrians were reduced by circumstances to an intellectually starved minority, which remained in ignorance of any scientific developments after the ninth century a.d., they were spared the need to struggle with new knowledge, or to re-examine the dogmas of their ancient faith. It was for this reason that the sudden impact of Western science 20 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES proved such a shock to educated Parsis in the mid nineteenth century, causing many of them not to attempt to reassess their traditional doctrines but largely to abandon them. 41 The oppressed Iranis were able in their isolation to continue longer believing that this earth was the centre of the universe, and man the crown of creation, brought into being for a clear purpose which had been made known to him through a complete and final revelation. Such beliefs were satisfying ones to live by, and when one considers the intellectual difficulties which beset the modern 'liberal' Zoroastrian, it is hard not to envy the calm certainties which the otherwise harsh lot of the Sharifabadis had allowed them to maintain. Though the world of traditional Zoroastrianism was thus re- assuringly comprehensible, man was called upon to live in it strenu- ously. Zoroaster's radical dualism means that this earth is seen as a battleground, in which the malignant forces of evil strive ceaselessly to corrupt every good thing; and so his followers are required to be like front-line soldiers, never slackening in either discipline or courage. Zoroastrianism is therefore an exacting faith, whose spiritual rewards are not to be lightly won. Its dualism is of a kind, however, which has been termed 'pro-cosmic', 42 for it lies not between spirit and matter, but between the good creation of Ohrmazd, which embraces both spirit and matter, and the negative, hostile one of Ahriman. There is no reason, therefore, why man should not enjoy to the full the creature pleasures of this material world, all pure joys and delights being in themselves part of the creation of Ohr- mazd, just as griefs and pains are assaults against them by his adversary. The Zoroastrian ideal is that of a joyful and upright spirit in a strong, vigorous body; and though excess of any kind is to be deplored, so is deficiency, so that, for instance, to fast is as bad as to over-indulge, since both alike weaken the body and diminish legitimate pleasure. Among the minor sensual enjoyments which Zoroastrians used to relish was the temperate drinking of wine, and in this matter the villagers of the Yazdi plain, who grew their own grapes, continued stoutly to defy the ordinances of Islam. The men regularly washed down their bitter rye-bread with cupfuls of wine, though the women contented themselves, except on feast- 41 In this they were encouraged fay the Christianized interpretations of their faith which were brought to them from nineteenth-century Europe, notably by Martin Haug in the 1860s. 42 See U. Bianchi, Zaman I Ohrmazd, ch. v. THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 21 days, with herbal concoctions. In this one respect, however, Reza Shah was unkind to Zoroastrians, for in his reign all wine-making was forbidden except under licence. This law coincided with an improvement in the Zoroastrians* standard of living, which enabled them to buy imported tea and sugar. So men and women alike became tea-drinkers with the rest of Iran, and turned most of their grape-juice, regretfully, into vinegar. The fact that Zoroastrianism, like Judaism, is a religion which encourages the enjoyment of life, and has a robust practical approach to most matters, must be, one would think, one of the factors which has enabled it to survive in the most adverse circumstances. In the main its precepts and practices work with the grain of human nature, not against it; and once one has accepted its discipline— which is not so hard for those brought up to it — it is on the whole life-enhancing to be an adherent of the Good Religion (as Zoroastrians themselves term their faith). Even devout Moslems of Yazd acknowledged this in part, commenting on the gaiety of Zoroastrian festivals in contrast with the melancholy character of most of their own. For them, holy occasions called for weeping and mourning, but for the Zoroastrians to worship in sadness is to drive away the divine. Yet though Zoroastrianism is essentially a sturdy and optimistic faith, the orthodox Sharifabadis were keenly conscious of the reality and power of evil. They lived in awareness of the presence of God and the Amahraspands, and in hope of heaven; but they had also a sharp sense of the active hostility of Ahriman and his forces, and " fear of hell was a powerful moral deterrent. One of the village women possessed an illustrated copy of the Arda Viraz Namag — the little Zoroastrian prose work which is held to be a forerunner of Dante's Divine Comedy — and she and others used sometimes to terrify themselves by looking at those pictures which showed, with crude vividness, the torments of the damned. Moreover, living as they did in a small, isolated community, with the mysterious desert around them, lapping against their unfenced fields, the Sharifabadis had a lively apprehension of the local workings of evil, and suffered the dread of devils and jinns, both in the great empty places and lurking about their homes. Some weaker souls succumbed, indeed, at times to practising a mild white magic in an attempt to control these unseen beings and to force them to remove sickness or blight or other misfortunes; but in true Zoroastrianism evil is to be defied, not subjugated or appeased, and the leaders of the Sharifabadi y 22 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES community were vigilant to discourage such practices (which, were much indulged in by their Moslem neighbours). They were fully prepared, however, to acknowledge the efficacy of holy words, and Avestan verses were used in talismanic fashion on many occasions. Since there were so few priests remaining in the Yazdi area, Sharifabad had come by the 1960s to form a single hust or parish with two other villages. One of these, Mazra< Kalantar, was out in the middle of the plain, and was slowly dying of drought. This, like Sharifabad, was an old, orthodox village, whose dwindling population did its best to maintain the ways of their forefathers. The other, Hasanabad-e Maybod, was developed early in the twentieth century by enterprising Zoroastrian merchants, who used their wealth in a traditional manner to make fertile the desert. Springs of sweet water were found there, under the higher mountain ranges on the further side of the plain from Sharifabad, and Hasanabad had become a nourishing place, with fine orchards and abundant crops; but it had no fire-temple, and lacked the rooted traditionalism of the other two villages. Since one priest had to serve all three places, cycling miles in heat and cold across the desert, his time was fully spent in performing essential acts of worship, and the rites of marriage and death; and so moral and practical leadership devolved very largely upon leading laymen. The Zoroastrian population of the three villages was estimated in 1964 to be just over 1,200 persons, with 140 in drought-stricken Mazra< Kalantar (where there were only some half a dozen im- poverished Moslem families), and about 200 in prosperous Has- anabad (beside a sizeable population of Moslems and Baha'is). 43 There was a formally instituted Anjoman for the Zoroastrians of the three villages, that is, an elected council with responsibility for guiding and administering the community's affairs. 44 This met in Sharifabad about every fifteen days, and had a membership of fifteen persons, eleven from Sharifabad, and two each from Mazra< and Hasanabad. The Anjoman had charge of the communal funds 43 Mazrar Kalantar, like Sharifabad, was proud of the fact that do one there went over to the new faith. 44 The minutes of this Anjoman go back to 1947. The cities of Yazd and Kerman have Anjomans with older records, starting in the mid nineteenth century. This type of council, with a chairman and written records, was fostered by the Parsi agent Manekji Limji Hataria (for a sketch of whose life and activities see 'Manekji Limji Hataria in Iran'). Long before that, however, the Irani Zoroastrians had been under the governance of their elders, who were officially recognized by the Moslem authorities, see, e.g., Chardin, Voyages, ii. 180. THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 23 and various trust funds, from which they maintained the sacred fires with their two buiIdings, 4S the small village shrines, and the dakhma (funerary tower) with its ever-burning fire, which stood in the desert to the south of Sharifabad, within sight from the edge of its fields. The Anjoman also paid two men to act as corpse-bearers or nasa-salars (usually referred to simply as the salars, in Dari thalars), and provided them with complete outfits of white garments for their work; and they further employed a man and an elderly woman as paksus ('those who wash clean') to lay out the dead. The Sharifa- badis gave generously but unobtrusively to the communal funds which the Anjoman dispensed, holding that such charitable acts should ordinarily be known only to God and the giver. In 1964 the head of the Anjoman, and mayor (kad-khoda) of the village of Sharifabad (representing both Zoroastrians and Moslems) was a remarkable man, Agha Rustam Noshiravan Belivani, to whose wise and resolute leadership the local Zoroastrians owed much. His forebears had played a leading part in the affairs of Sharifabad for at least seven generations, 46 and his father, great- uncle, 47 and great-grandfather had all been mayors before him (further back in this respect tradition did not go). This meant that they had been in a position of authority during the challenging years when the laws of the land, promulgated in remote Tehran, were granting Zoroastrians a freedom and equality which some of the local Moslems were bitterly reluctant to concede in practice. Naturally this long-established family had many blood-ties with others in the village, and had been responsible for various bene- factions there. The boys' primary school, for instance, was founded by a cousin who had no sons of his own. 48 It was here that Agha Rustam acquired a basic education, which he pursued so ably that 45 The now empty building of ASor Khara is still carefully maintained (see further below, p. 81). 46 Their names, in ascending order, are Noshiravan, Gushtasp, Khodarahm, Gushtasp, Belivan, Jamshid, Pavarza. The unusual — perhaps indeed unique — • name of Belivan was adapted by Agha Rustam to form a surname when fixed family names were introduced in Iran. There is a tradition that the family was founded by a remote forebear who came from Khorasan to settle in the village. Similar family traditions are not rare in Yazd and Kerman, for these two regions were the last bastions of the old faith, to which, evidently, Zoroastrians withdrew from other regions as conditions there grew intolerable. 47 Namely Turk Jamshidi, the third son of Khodarahm, whose daughter Bibi was married to Noshiravan. First-cousin marriages are favoured by Zoroastrians, and in this the Moslems of Iran have held to the way of the old religion. 48 Namely Jamshid, the eldest son of Khodarahm. 24 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES he went on to qualify as a lawyer; but instead of then departing like so many others to Tehran, he remained in Sharifabad, practising, as the only Zoroastrian lawyer in the region, in the thriving small town of Ardekan nearby. Of his sisters one, Murvarid, married Paridim Jehangir Rashidi, 49 a tenant farmer whom Agha Rustam persuaded to take on the arduous task of acting as guardian of the dakhma, and daily tending its ever-burning fire. Another sister, Piruza, became the second wife of Dastur Khodadad Shehriar Neryosangi, whose uncle had been hust-mobed in Sharifabad for many years, and who was himself thus persuaded to settle there. (Some such special tie was needed, since Sharifabad was an un- popular parish with the Yazdi priests, for not only was it far from the city, but the Ardekani Moslems were notorious for seeking to vex their Zoroastrian neighbours.) D. Khodadad was a priest pre- eminently suited for Sharifabad, for he was steeped in orthopraxy. As a young man, when he had been newly made priest, he was appointed by the Dastur dasturan 50 to be one of the four 'atasbands' or servers of the Atas Bahram in Yazd, and this work he did for four years (with fifteen days on, fifteen days off, for the service was exacting, especially in a hot climate). The other atasbands were all venerable men. One of them, D. Mihragan, then in his nineties, 51 was deeply versed in the rites of tending the sacred fire, and was entrusted also with the general training of young priests in liturgy and ritual; another, D. Ardeshir Shehriar, specialized in administer- ing the great purification of the barasnom-e no-swa. Together they instructed the young Khodadad in these and many other things during his years of service at the fire-temple. Both the knowledge and the discipline of those days remained with him, so that he was not only an authority on the traditional beliefs of the faith, but scrupulously upheld its observances, guarding his own ritual purity, moreover, as strictly as possible, a fact much valued by his parishioners. 52 49 The Rashid from whom the family took its surname was Paridun's great- grandfather, who had come to Sharifabad from Abshahi. The Rashidis had inter- married a great deal with the Belivani family group. 50 T>. Namdar Shehriar, the last generally acknowledged incumbent of this ancient office. sr He had been at one time atasband of the Dadgah fire at the Tehran house of the great Zoroastrian merchant, Arbab Jamshid Bahman. 32 In 1971 D. Khodadad left the hust of Sharifabad to become priest-in-charge of the relatively new fire-temple in Shiraz, but four years later he returned to live and work there again. THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL* FIRES 25 Even with such a priest living among them, the laity in Sharifabad had to do many tasks which in the past would have been done by priests, notably tending the sacred fire and caring for the shrines. These tasks were undertaken mostly by elderly men and women of known probity. Minor religious services too were often solemnized by laymen, when D. Khodadad had been called away to one of the other villages of his parish; and in general in 1964 Sharifabad was striving, without help or encouragement from outside, to maintain as fully as possible the observances of its ancient faith, while at the same time keeping alive its ethical and spiritual dignity. 53 The Sharifabadis were not alone in this endeavour, for there were of course devoutly orthodox Zoroastrians in the other Yazdi villages also, and in the cities of Iran; but the communal tradition was undoubtedly strongest among them. I had heard the village lauded in this respect before visiting it; and when I did so, I had the immense good fortune to be invited by Agha Rustam Belivani and his wife Tahmina Khanom to become their guest. For the next seven months I had the privilege of living as a member of their household, enjoying their friendship and that of their children; and in the following pages I hope to be able to describe something of what I learnt through their kindness and that of their relatives, and of the villagers at large, whose patience and courtesy seemed endless. Among them, two who were especially helpful were Khanom Sarvar Afshari from Aliabad, who had married an uncle of Agha Rustam's, and who, coming into the village from outside, was able to draw illuminating comparisons between the ways of Sharif- abad and other places; and Agha Erdeshir Qudusi, a friend of Agha Rustam's, who had spent many years in India. In general, because of the strength of their faith, the Sharifabadis were ready to expound their beliefs and observances unreservedly, and D. Khodadad likewise displayed a constant readiness to en- lighten and teach. By a minor piece of good luck I had been able to acquire a woman's bicycle in Yazd, one imported two decades earlier for an English missionary, and I could thus accompany him on his journeys about his parish, and so learn something of the other two villages, as well as a little of the duties and responsibilities 53 Indeed, outside influences from their co-religionists tended to be positively discouraging, with reforming Zoroastrians from Bombay or Tehran coming to the village to lecture against the maintenance of many ancient observances. Such lectures had had little or no effect by 1964, beyond rousing a deep, though courteously bridled, indignation. 26 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES of a Zoroastrian priest. The way to Mazra c lay across the desert, and even on the road to Hasanabad we seldom met more than one or two people. The only direction in which D. Khodadad was unwilling to have my company was through Ardekan, for he felt it hard enough to have to traverse its unfriendly streets as a Zoro- astrian priest, without the added provocation of being accompanied by an unveiled woman on a bicycle. The Sharifabadis had constant communication with the other Zoroastrian villages, and since these will necessarily figure from time to time in the following pages, a brief account of them seems desirable. They differed greatly in character, some being old places like Sharifabad itself, with cramped houses and twisting, narrow lanes, and these all had their own fire-temples. Others, like Hasan- abad, were relatively new settlements, developed during the previous hundred years or so by Zoroastrian merchants, and these had more spacious dwellings, with gardens, and wide, tree-lined streets. Many of these too had their own places of worship. In the 1960s the whole Yazdi region was suffering from drought, and some villages were severely affected, and were becoming slowly depopulated. Apart from their individual characteristics, the Zoroastrian villages formed four separate groups. The one comprising Sharifabad and its two neighbours was the furthest from the city of Yazd, and was administered from Ardekan. The group next to them, to the south- east, was formed by villages of the Rustaq or 'Rural District' of Yazd. There were six of these, strung out along or near the highway- — that is, on the more arid side of the plain — namely (reckoning from north to south) Aliabad, Ja'farabad, Husaynabad, Asrabad, Allah- abad (pronounced Elabad by the Zoroastrians), 54 and Nusratabad. There were also a few Zoroastrians at Mehdiabad-e Rustaq and Iz- abad. All these villages carried their dead to the dakhma of Elabad, set superbly on the solitary, knife-edged hill of Zarch. None was very old — at the most, it was reckoned, three or four hundred years — and all were menaced, in varying degrees, by shifting, devouring sands, for drought had killed their protective bamboo-thickets and lines of trees. Beyond the villages of the Rustaq came the suburban ones, in s * All the village names sounded a little different in Dari, but three, indicated here in brackets, were known to the Zoroastrians only in their contracted forms, which are used accordingly throughout this book. Some of the other colloquial pronunciations are given in the index after the standard form. Sharifabad itself, for instance, was always spoken of as Sharfabad. THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES 27 a ring round Yazd. Their inhabitants called themselves Sahrl, 'of the city', as distinct from malati, the term they used for someone who lived in Yazd itself. To the east (reckoning again from north to south) were three old villages, Kanu, Narseabad, and Mariamabad (called Moriabad) and a relatively new one, Mehdiabad-e Yazd. To the west were other old villages, Kuce Buyuk, Khorramshah, Qasimabad, Rahmatabad, and Mohammadabad (Mandavad) on the Yazd-Kerman highway. This last-named village had had a sizeable Zoroastrian population up to the 1940s, but in 1964 there were only four Zoroastrian families left, and two of them were preparing to depart for Tehran. The other two suburban villages, Ahrestan and Khairabad, both old, were on the road from Yazd to Shiraz, a little further to the south-west, that is, than Kuce Buyuk and Khorramshah. They and all the other suburban villages carried their dead to the dakhma of Yazd itself, not far from Rahmat- abad. Finally there was the group formed by the pretty upland village of Taft, higher up the Shiraz road, and the villages near it. These (to name them from the direction of Yazd) were Mobareke, Cham and Zainabad, with two newish ones, Khalilabad and Husayni, where there were only a few Zoroastrian households remaining. These villages all bore their dead to the beautifully placed dakhma of Cham. Cham itself and Mobareke were suffering badly from drought, and their population was dwindling. Nevertheless the whole group, being (after Sharifabad) the remotest from urban influences, preserved the old ways and traditions very faithfully. Its villages had followed the example of the Sharifabadi group in forming a collective Anjoman, whose representatives met in Taft. The suburban villages, and those of the Rustaq, had no such or- ganization. Some relied on the Anjoman of the city of Yazd, others had their separate Anjomans and managed their own affairs. In 1964 the small band of Yazdi priests (some of them only part- time clergy) were stretched to minister at all adequately to this scattered Zoroastrian population. All the villages of the Rustaq had been made into a single hust, and there a certain Gushtasp from Elabad (who had undergone no-swd) was officially nominated dastur-e deh or 'village priest', and he officiated at all minor cere- monies, the hust-mobed coming from Yazd only for the major ones, that is, those concerned with death, and the marriage-service. (Each priest kept a little book to record the date of every death 1 28 THE VILLAGE OF THE TWO 'CATHEDRAL' FIRES among his parishioners, and he was expected to come for the related ceremonies without any reminder from the family. 55 ) Taft and its villages formed another hust, and the remaining priests divided Yazd and the suburban villages among them. The Sharif - abadis themselves, with characteristic foresight and energy, took steps to send D. Khodadad's fifteen-year-old son Shehriar to Bombay in 1965 to be made priest, in the hope that he would return to minister to them; but he felt no vocation, and there were then no other new entrants to the priesthood in Yazd. As well as the locally instituted, semi-official post of dastur-e deh, an older lay office existed, that of the dahmobed. The title probably means 'servant of the priest', and the position was a respected one, somewhat like that of a churchwarden in Anglican Christianity. There was a dahmobed in every village, and one in the city of Yazd, and the office clearly had nothing to do with any shortage of priests, since it is attested already in the Rivayats. 56 The dahmobed was appointed by the local elders, but the post tended to become heredi- tary, and in Ahrestan one family had passed it down from father to son for eight generations, with no more than a formal ratification at the death of each. The incumbent there in 1964, Erdeshir Dah- mobed (he had taken the title as surname), wore white like a priest when engaged on his duties; and, himself an old man, he recalled how his father, living to well over a hundred years of age, had handed him the keys to the village fire- temple on his death-bed, as a hereditary trust. He, like other dahmobeds, knew a good deal of Avestan by heart, and could solemnize the 'outer' religious services when necessary. The duties of dahmobed and lay atasband com- plemented each other in ways that varied slightly from place to place (in Elabad indeed the two offices were held by the one person); and though Sharifabad had two dahmobeds in 1964, it nevertheless assigned more duties than other villages to its atasband. Yet there as elsewhere the existence of this old office demonstrated the close traditional involvement of the laity in acts of Worship and religious affairs, and contributed to their being able to maintain observances faithfully even without the help of priests. « This is the custom also among the Parsis. 56 See, e.g., Dhabhar, Riv., intro., lxii. THE WORSHIP OF OHRMAZD AND THE CREATIONS Zoroaster is the only founder of a great revealed religion who was a priest; and as such he clearly knew the value of observance, and therefore provided his followers with firm guidance for their devo- tional fives. He himself, so the tradition says, was the author of the greatest of the Zoroastrian prayers, the Ahuna vairyo or Ahunvar, a brief utterance in honour of Ahura Mazda which is for the Zoro- astrian what the Lord's Prayer is for the Christian. It is the first prayer that is taught to a child. It is uttered at every act of worship, public or private, and because of its sanctity it can be used in all vicissitudes, and (if repeated a prescribed number of times) may at need replace all other devotions. Thus some of the older Sharifabadi women could not read and knew little Avestan by heart; and for certain religious exercises they made themselves rosaries on which they could tell the number of Ahunvars as they recited them. As for times of private prayer, it was ordained that the Zoroastrian . should pray once during each of the five watches of the twenty- four-hour day— an invaluable religious exercise which Muhammad adopted from Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrians pray standing, and, as en- joined by their prophet, in the presence of fire— that is, either facing the sun, or before a hearth-fire or temple-fire, or a lighted lamp- so that this may help them to fix their thoughts on righteousness. Every time that a Zoroastrian prays, he unties and reties the sacred cord, the 'kostl', which he wears round his waist, so that the Iranis call this basic act of worship 'making new the sacred cord' {koSti no kartwun). 1 The words spoken then are addressed to Ohrmazd the Lord, and include an execration of Ahriman. The essential prayers for each watch take only some five minutes or so to say, once thoroughly learnt. Nevertheless, to say them 1 The Pahlavi term kwstyk is pronounced as kosti in Dari, as kustf by the Parsis. The Parsis use the idiom kusti bastan, 'to tie the kustf, for this basic rite. 30 THE WORSHIP OF OHRMAZD AND THE CREATIONS regularly five times a day is an exacting discipline, although it is not necessary for the laity to break the night's sleep to do so. The usual custom (followed also by Moslems) is to recite the prayers of the third watch just before sunset, make a pause as the sun goes down, and then say those of the fourth watch, which has then just begun. The devout get up before dawn to say the prayers of the fifth watch, and when the sun has risen they welcome the new day with the prayers of its first watch. The five obligatory prayers can thus be said in three groups, the third time of prayer being during the noontide watch. The custom of the twofold dawn and sunrise prayers conflicts, however, with another religious duty, for Zoro- astrians hold that each new day should be welcomed, not only with godly thoughts and words, but also with cleanliness and order. So another custom, strictly observed in Sharifabad, was that the women got up at first light to sweep and dust and tidy; and they finished their work, as the sun came up, by carrying round the house a small panful of embers from the hearth-fire on which they scat- tered dried marjoram leaves to give out a pleasant fragrance. Finally, the pan was set outside the house-door, so that the lanes of the Zoroastrian quarter were full of sweet scents to greet the rising sun. 2 If all this was done, it was believed, the yazad Sro§ would visit the house with his benign presence, and the day begin auspiciously. Women could not do all this work between dawn and sunrise and also say two sets of prayers; but the priests of old declared that, although a man has the duty to pray, a woman's best act of devotion is the work of her hands, as she serves father, husband, or son. In the Belivani household in 1964 the boys were still too young to have put on the sacred cord, and so Agha Rustam prayed alone on behalf of the whole household each morning, his deep voice filling the small courtyard with sonorous Avestan as he stood facing east, where the sun came up over the mountains. In general, even in devout Sharifabad, the full number of five daily prayers was said only on holy days and during pilgrimages, and otherwise most men were content, on working days, to say either the morning or evening prayers; but in this duty I never knew Agha Rustam to fail, whether he slept under his own or another's roof. The other regular act of devotion incumbent on Zoroastrians was keeping seven annual feasts of obligation. Tradition has it that these * For similar observances carried out by Parsi women in Gujarat see Seervai and Patel, 'Gujarat Parsis', 209. THE WORSHIP OF OHRMAZD AND THE CREATIONS 31 feasts were founded by the prophet himself, and they are therefore of the greatest holiness, so that to neglect them is a sin which 'goes to the Bridge'' — which weighs, that is, among one's evil deeds at the day of judgement. Records (beginning from Sasanian times) show that these seven feasts have been kept devoutly and generally by rich and poor, in good times and in bad, down the centuries, and 1964 in Sharifabad saw no slackening in the ancient observances. Despite the tradition that these holy days were founded by Zoroaster, their Avestan names suggest a remote pagan origin: they appear to have begun, that is, as festivals to celebrate the seasons of mid spring, mid summer, and mid winter, harvest, and the return of cattle from summer pastures, the annual visitation of All Souls, and New Year's Day. But Zoroaster, it seems, drew together this diversity of feasts to form a uniform chain of six, which he refounded to celebrate the six creations, with the seventh, New Year's Day, held to honour the seventh creation of fire. The six were called collectively in Avestan the 'times of the year' (ydirya ratavo), and were known in Middle Persian as 'gahambar', reduced in current speech to 'gahambar', 'ga'ambar', or 'gambar'. The first of them, Mid-Spring (Maidhydi.zarama), celebrated the first creation, sky; and so on through the year, with homage paid to water, earth, plants, and cattle successively, until the sixth feast, that of Hamaspathmaedaya, kept originally on the last day of the year, commemorated the crea- tion of man. The correspondences in this way of the six gahambars and the six creations are set out in detail and with great clarity in the Pahlavi books. The seventh feast, No Ruz, which honours fire, celebrated the creation which brought life and energy to all the rest. The first five gahambars were kept with uniform observances, but the sixth one and No Ruz both had their special rites. At all gahambars the religious services are devoted to Ohrmazd himself, as the Supreme Creator. Originally each of the gahambars, like No Ruz, lasted for a single day; but at the beginning of the Sasanian period a major calendar change, imposed, it seems, by the power of the Persian throne, brought confusion to the Zoroastrian community, which resulted in the keeping of what were thought to be the old and new feast days, four days apart. 3 After a generation or two had lived with this state of affairs, the difficulty was solved by finking each pair of days together, thus forming continuous six-day festivals. This practice 1 See 'On the calendar of Zoroastrian feasts', 513-39. 32 THE WORSHIP OF OHRMAZD AND THE CREATIONS lasted for several hundred years; but eventually, some time after the tenth century, a day was lopped off each (to bring them all into accord with the festival of the five intercalary days, instituted at the calendar change); and since then they have been kept in this way. The six gahambars, it was enjoined, were to be times of worship and joy; and only necessary work should be done then. This in- junction would obviously have been easier to keep when each feast lasted for only a day; and in a farming community a good deal of necessary work had to go on during the extended festivals, such as ploughing, sowing, and irrigating, hay-making and harvest, as well as caring for stock. To do work which was not essential was regarded, however, as a sin; and so boys enjoyed a happy break from such irksome tasks as weeding in the fields, and women and girls aban- doned spindle and loom, which otherwise were seldom idle. The Zoroastrian calendar does not know the Semitic division into weeks, and provides no regularly recurrent rest-day. The five-day festivals thus provided welcome and well-earned breaks in routine. (It is a major factor in the weakening of traditional Zoroastrianism in the towns that there, as a minority, the Zoroastrians have to accept the Moslem pattern of a Friday holiday, and cannot, if they work for others, get time off to keep their own holy days.) There are a number of other five-day festivals in the Zoroastrian year whose observance is meritorious, but not obligatory; but the gahambars were sharply distinguished from them, not only because of their greater sanctity, but also because, on account of this, they alone were regularly endowed. Since to keep them was of the greatest merit, it was held to benefit the soul if a man set aside a piece of property— a house, or a field, or rights over water— to found an annual celebration on one of the gahambar days; and so piously was this carried out that in an old and orthodox village like Sharif- abad not a single one of the thirty gahambar days lacked its endowed observances. This custom of making pious foundations is un- doubtedly ancient, and was probably practised already in Parthian times, if not earlier, although the first clear evidence of it comes from the Sasanian period. Zoroastrian usages of this kind, it is held, provided the model for the Islamic institution of vaqfot charitable bequests; 4 and the Zoroastrian practice itself continues with regard to gahambars down to the present day. It even received an added * See Anahit Perikhanian, 'Private endowment-funds in ancient Iran' (in Russian), VDI, i973> 3~ 2 5- THE WORSHIP OF OHRMAZD AND THE CREATIONS 33 impetus in Moslem times because of a particularly harsh law, which provided that if one member of a Zoroastrian family embraced Islam, then he inherited everything and his brethren were left penni- less. This was undoubtedly a powerful incentive to adopt Islam; but by one of the odd anomalies which characterized the dealings of the authorities with Zoroastrians, if a pious bequest by one of the old religion were duly set down and registered, then this was respected, and the endowment could not be alienated even in favour of a convert. Plainly where Zoroastrian communities dwindled and grew weak, such trusts were ignored and swallowed up; but where they remained in reasonable strength, as in the Yazdi area, it was possible to maintain these bequests. Piety and prudence united, therefore, to encourage their foundation. The local Moslems claim indeed that, on the scale in which it was done, the practice was unfair to the children, depriving them of their inheritance; but the way it worked was that a member of the family was nominated as trustee of the en- dowment, and he cultivated the fields or lived in the house, setting aside a portion of the crops or a certain sum of money, as if in rent, for the annual celebration of the gahambar. Admittedly his livelihood was thus diminished to a fixed extent, but at least it was assured. Endowments were distributed as far as possible among different branches of a family, in the interests of fairness; and since all the extended family joined together in preparing for and celebrating the gahambar itself, this was an excellent means of furthering soli- darity among them. Hence it is said, in a Zoroastrian text; 'Everyone who has founded a gahambar has rejoiced the souls of his ancestors for seventy generations. >s The direct forebears of Agha Rustam Belivani, back to seven generations, all founded gahambars, whose trusts are distributed among seven branches of the extended family. Until recently members of all seven lived in Sharifabad, but three are no longer represented there (their members having all removed to Tehran). There is no longer any need to found gahambars to secure in- heritances; indeed, such efforts have been made under the present dynasty to treat Zoroastrians fairly that it is now possible, if the local Anjoman acts energetically, to maintain an endowment even if the heirs have become Moslems and wish to alienate it. Thus the Sharifabadi Anjoman administers one gahambar fund on behalf of a Moslem family in the village, the celebration itself being carried s Hiv., Unvala, i. 435, col. b, line 1. 34 THE WORSHIP OF OHRMAZD AND THE CREATIONS out, as a pious duty, in Agha Rustam's house. In this case the endow- ment was made three generations ago. The founder's son was a reluctant convert to Islam, and was glad to have the observances continued, but the grandson was a Moslem by upbringin