The Sacred Water of Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrians venerate water. To pollute it is to defile it. It's one of seven creations and is linked to the Amesha Spenta Hordād. Water is life and to be revered.
I’m going to skip Monday’s lecture summary and dive right into Zoroastrianism’s veneration of water. Firoza Mistree led the class on Observances and Practices for the Veneration of Water. I almost drowned in the firehose of information. (Yeah, I’m full of water words! Appropriate, right?)
After her one-hour lecture, we had a Q&A, which ended up delving into Mumbai’s unique geology of shallow freshwater aquifers (which dug wells reach) and borehole wells that drill deep into fresh groundwater. And perhaps a scientific explanation for the miracle at the Toothi Fire Temple. I’m not sure if I got everything down, but I’ll try to summarize the salient points.
Water Is Sacred
Water is one of the seven creations connected to one of the seven Amesha Spentas. Hordād is the Amesha Spenta linked with water, who provides good health, perfection, purity, and brings rain. Hordād helps Ahura Mazda look after the world. That’s why Zoroastrians consider water sacred and not to be polluted.
Injunction Against Polluting Water
For millennia, peoples have known about Zoroastrians’ reverence for water. Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century BCE was the first of many outside observers over the millennia who noted Zoroastrians’ profound reverence for rivers and injunction against polluting them. To pollute is to defile. Parsis don’t wash, bathe, urinate, or spit into water bodies. (In Iran, they’d draw water, carry it to a dry place, and wash there in order to avoid polluting the well water.) Herodotus observed a Parsi with a golden goblet pouring water into the sea with their face towards the sun. They weren’t blessing the sun but honouring the water. Zoroastrians speak ancient litanies to the water soon after sunrise and pray before sunset. Praying to the water after sunset is religiously prohibited because that’s when the daevas abound and would clap and dance if people prayed to the water when they’re up and about. In other words, praying after sunset emboldens evil.
Since water is a sacred creation linked to one of the divinities, Zoroastrians treat it with the respect accorded to a divine being, pray to it, make offerings to it, and make wishes. It was once a common sight on the shores of the Arabian Sea to see Parsis, laity and priests alike, standing and praying to the water divinity for the fulfilment of wishes, good health, prosperity, and wellbeing of family members. And then wade into the sea to toss in offerings.
Offerings include flowers, dried fruits, coconuts, coins (wells, not the sea), and so on. Today, with our worldwide heightened sense of cleaning up and keeping our environment clean, Parsis only allow biodegradable offerings, for example, individual flowers but not garlands tied with string like in the old days.
Travel = Pollution
Travelling through the sea was considered polluting the water. This injunction was so serious that when Nero defeated a Parthian king and required said king to travel to Rome with his enormous retinue, he refused to take the sea route. As king priest, he could not pollute the water. He took the arduous land route instead.
That led to a question I asked our course co-ordinator Kerman Daruwalla at the end of the week: Why, if sea travel was verboten and historians record Zoroastrians eschewing the professions of sailor and firefighter because they’d pollute sacred water and fire, did Parsis become great sea traders, sailing all the way to China and back? The short answer is they don’t know when or why that change. However, to this day, when priests are ritually pure, they cannot travel by water, else that would vitiate their ritual purity. Are you confused? I am. It’s sometimes difficult to understand an ancient culture that changed its injunctions over the centuries, while we have to live with the not knowing and contradictions. But contradictions are inherently human, aren’t they?
As we learnt in the Foundations course, Zoroastrians developed an ingenious water infrastructure that delivered pure, clean drinking water to homes built in the desert climate of Central Asia. This class talked about the spiritual aspect of this water.
Parsi Wells in Bombay
Replicating their ancient civilization, Parsis had wells in their homes for domestic and religious purposes. When these homes were to be demolished to make way for multi-storey apartments, Parsis insisted on preserving these wells within the new four-to-five-storey buildings. However, the builders could not leave the wells open to the skies for health and safety reasons. And so the builders architecturally incorporated them into a building’s design. The wells were enclosed in the footprint, and the well’s top left uncovered so that the Parsis could access them for religious purposes. Every floor above it used glass as flooring material over the well so that apartment dwellers could look down at the well from whichever floor they lived on. One school required the well to be sealed for safety reasons. They turned it into a shrine where Parsis could leave offerings to it.
A story was told that when a man took his mother for the first time to the Caspian Sea, she dressed in her finest Yazidi costume. After she’d prayed to the water, she waded into the sea to present her offerings. Her son asked her why she’d ruin her best costume. She said that when visiting the Queen, you don’t worry about such things. I can hear the mother’s scold as well as the esteem in which she held the water.
The Toothi Temple
Toothi wanted to dedicate a Fire Temple to her deceased husband. Normally, they find a source of freshwater first and decide the site of the Fire Temple based on that. But she did it the other way around. She selected a site near the sea’s shoreline, but when they dug the well, saline water flowed in. They had to transform the saline water into freshwater since she wasn’t about to change the location. She commanded them to fashion a pulley with a chair and harness to hold her weight and lower her into the well for 40 days where she lit oil lamps and prayed. The saline water stopped. A deluge of freshwater flowed in. Today, worshippers light oil lamps and offer flowers at this well to grant wishes. Later on, a student of Bombay’s geology explained that shallow aquifers underlie Mumbai, allowing turtles to travel from one place to another and for freshwater to replace saline water in wells. Maybe the miracle wasn’t a miracle. But in the world of metaphysics, how can we say for certain that natural water flow was the sole reason behind the transformation?
Personal Affinity
I never learnt about this aspect of Zoroastrianism, yet I’ve always felt an affinity to water. Lake Ontario anchors my sense of location within Toronto, and I missed seeing it for the 14 years (and now during the pandemic) when I was unable to go to any of its beaches or boardwalks (see photo at top). When I visit places without a river or sea or stream or lake, I feel a bit disconnected. When I stood on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, I sensed an intense, menacing presence. Flying over the Atlantic, I always seek a glimpse of its surfing grey-blue waves. The year Toronto’s harbour iced up so thickly, people went skating on it, I put in every effort to overcome my physical fatigue and mobility limitations to go see and photograph it.
I’ve cheered when the Federal government and the city began cleaning up our polluted Great Lake and now transforming the Don River back to its life-giving natural state.
The Yasna ritually purifies water as a way to represent Zoroastrian cosmology in action.
Ahura Mazda created a perfect world. We work hand in hand with God to rejuvenate Earth and return it to perfection, which will only happen after the resurrection when evil is once and for all eliminated. Until then, priests perform the Yasna ceremony, which begins with drawing water from the well in the Fire Temple and ends with pouring the consecrated water back into the well as a libation to spiritually purify all the water in the world. The effort put into transforming the well water from ordinary to infused with divine power and strength parallels the effort humans put in working hand in hand to transform this Earth back towards its initial perfect state.