Zoroastrian Rituals
I admit, I'm not a fan of rituals repeated regularly ad infinitum, but writing this post on the complex and myriad Zoroastrian rituals provided a different perspective.
The third week was all about rituals with a side dish on short liturgies. I only realized on the last day that the trouble I have with the topic is I don’t understand the philosophy underpinning Zoroastrian rituals unlike Christian ones. For example, the Eucharist — as Christians in the know call it — love that jargon, eh? — the ritual of communion is based on Jesus’s teachings in the last Passover supper as related in the Gospel of Matthew (26:26-28). The communion ritual arises from a recorded event in which Jesus instructed his disciples. But it’s also rooted in the philosophy of thanksgiving that Jesus lived. I don’t have an equivalent understanding of Zoroastrian rituals.
I think scholars and anthropologists are like physicians who super-specialize: they’re interested in the actions, the behaviour, the minutiae. They use scholarship to answer the 5Ws without necessarily investigating the religious ‘Why?” unlike the rest of us. Or maybe the problem for me was that the guest lecturers and most of my classmates understand it so well, they skip right over that part. Either way, I can’t root the Zoroastrian rituals in something I can grasp other than one memory I have with my grandparents in Bombay when I asked them what they were doing and my grandmother showed me their prayer book and taught me a few words and the reason they recite them. I’ve forgotten her words, retaining only the visuals, but I think that might’ve been the Khorde Avesta. How would I know now for sure? All this makes it harder for me to remember this week’s lectures. But I’ll give it a go!
Rules for Zoroastrian Rituals
First up: Rules! Anyone entering into a ritual must follow a few rules. They are to be physically clean (physical purity), ritually pure (spiritual purity), and follow a dress code. That last sounds like Christianity up until this century.
Dress Code
There’s something to be said about a dress code. “Dressing up” is like telling yourself you’re doing something out of the ordinary, something precious. The “come as you are” mode is more inclusive as not everyone has the ability to dress up or the monies to buy the correct clothing. But as the cancer program “Look Good, Feel Better” noted: one really does feel better if one makes an effort to look as good as possible. A person may wear torn jeans and a frayed shirt, but tucking the shirt in, unlike one’s usual mode, says to oneself that one is going to do something extraordinary and important.
But a Christian dress code, like the Zoroastrian one, also included what one must wear, and some high churches still require women to cover their hair (why not men, eh?).
Preparatory Rules
If Christians think they don’t follow rules, they do, maybe formally like following the Anglican Church’s preparatory prayers for communion, or informally by always starting services with contemporary worship songs, which praise God and invoke blessings.
Ontological Dynamism
Dr. Mariano Errichiello of SOAS, University of London, introduced the concept of ontological dynamism. It’s an anthropological concept adapted from the philosophical concept of ontology, that is, the state of being, of nature and reality. Ontological dynamism is about the productive nature of rituals that transform their targets from one state to another, that is, consecration, and which themselves may have changed over millennia. When studying Zoroastrian rituals, a secularist may have difficulty understanding some concepts since the divine is not part of their own ontology. By studying rituals not from the secular Western perspective but from the Zoroastrian ontology, by including lived experience and community narratives into their studies, a scholar (and anyone who doesn’t understand the spiritual or divine aspects of life) can approach the subject with a clearer lens.
Ritual Roles
Being the oldest extant religion, Zoroastrianism has the most rituals of any religion. Yet though they’re prescribed down to the littlest detail, they’re not set in absolute, unchanging stone. Priests and devotees approach them with a practical mindset so that they’re prepared for when things go wrong…although occasionally a goat may upset all contingencies and force the priests to restart an hours-long Long Liturgy like the Yasna!
A side note: I don’t actually understand what role the Yasna plays.
By understanding the four roles rituals play, we can start understanding their ontological dynamism: What transformations are they making? And we can consider: Why are they making these transformations? Have these roles changed or remained stable over millennia? Rituals:
Link the physical and divine worlds and serve as a communication bridge.
Preserve religious texts.
Invoke divine beings and souls; express the people’s gratitude; and seek blessings from the Divine and from divine beings.
Remember the livings’ ancestors, thus fulfilling a religious obligation towards them.
I’d add that rituals also help human beings fight evil. Some like the Vendidad and Boi rituals are specifically for that function. Having help from the spiritual realm to fight evil is something I can get behind. What about you?
Ritual Purposes
Rituals dramatize and enact religious teachings, thereby reinforcing them through repetition. Within the context of the four roles, Zoroastrian rituals serve four purposes related to religious teachings.
Four Religious Purposes
Belief in Ahura Mazda and divine beings.
Belief in the material and spiritual worlds.
Living in harmony with all creations.
Belief in the immortality of the soul.
All of these purposes are found in Christianity, too. Christians believe in God and the angels mentioned in the Bible; some invoke guardian angels like Zoroastrians do. Christians know we live in a material and spiritual world. Christians were tasked with looking after all Creation, but are only now starting to get that. And Christians, like Zoroastrians, believe the soul is immortal and humans will be resurrected.
In comparing Zoroastrian beliefs to ones we’re familiar with, Zoroastrianim becomes knowable.
Broad Purposes
Broadly, Zoroastrian rituals serve many different purposes. As noted by a guest lecturer, we all have rituals. Birthday parties are rituals; so are morning routines and bedtime routines; and Christmas Day opening of presents, whether secular or religious. But, as I understand it, Zoroastrianism codifies many of these kinds of events within specific liturgies:
Commemoration: Historical events, anniversaries, and so on.
Thanksgiving: For house, office, and so on. These include the Jashan and Fareshta.
Consecration: The sacred Fires, Agyari and Atash Behram, Dokhma, Varasyaji, and so on.
Life Cycle or Rites of Passage: Navjote, weddings, deaths. Only priests use the Navar and Maratab rituals.
Purification: Purification happens before and during different rituals or is itself the entire ritual. Purification rites include the Kasti, Nahan, Bareshnum.
Within these broad purposes, we find specific purposes, such as:
Kasti ritual: Cleanses, protects, and energizes.
Jashan ritual: Creates harmony with creations and is for charity.
Boi ritual: Feeds the fire and empowers against evil.
Yasna ritual: To be honest, I’m not clear on this Long Liturgy’s purpose. It has to do with the soul’s cycle and drinking haoma. This latter didn’t tell me anything about the Why? behind the Yasna.
Vendidad ritual: Combats evil when it’s at its zenith, usually at midnight.
Christianity does have purification prayers (eg, the Collect for Purity before communion service), but I’m not aware of purification rituals per se. Perhaps novitiates or ordinands before ordination undergo them?
But why do human beings need purification? It’s a strange kind of concept to me of being ritually purified before undergoing or conducting another ritual, which itself may also include purifying elements — although in writing this post, its purpose is starting to become clear to me.
From a secular point of view, or even many Christian denominations, a purification ritual seems a little excessive and strange. But if you consider the Divine is sacred and holy — meaning set apart — and we are subject to bad thoughts, bad words, bad deeds aka sin and that Ahriman or Satan stalks our world, then to approach the Divine, humans may feel they need to cleanse themselves, not just physically but also spiritually. The how varies between religions, I gather.
Ritual Types: The Inner and Outer; The Purifying, The Life Cycles
Inner rituals are done by priests in the Fire Temple.
Inner Rituals
Baj-dharna/Dron Yasht
Yasna
Visparad
Videvdad
Nirangdin (consecrating bull urine for use in other rituals)
As I understand it, there are two levels of priests, and only the highest level can conduct an inner ritual. Usually two priests, who have already undergone ritual purification, purify two priests who would be conducting a Long Liturgy like the nirangdin. Requiring this many priests wouldn’t be an issue in a…well, I was going to say a Christian church, but even Christian churches are losing priests. Some churches and parishes don’t have a minister or priest. But Zoroastrianism is experiencing exponentially greater losses. Only 15 or 16 priests in the entire world are qualified to conduct the Yasna Long Liturgy.
The Ontario group are trying to rectify this process downward to extinction by building a place of worship for the Greater Toronto community and creating a place to train priests here. Also, being practical-minded, Zoroastrians in India have developed emergency measures to use when not enough priests are available to purify. One thing I’ve noticed in the Zoroastrian Perspectives course is that I’m an outlier as a student, being from North America, and the diaspora experience is generally not included. No lecturer talked about what Ontario Zoroastrians are doing to reverse extinction and seem unaware of it.
Outer Rituals
Outer rituals can be done by a priest or a lay person in the Fire Temple, at home, outside in a park, and so on. Outer rituals include:
Afringan
Stum
Farokshsi
Jashan
Faresta
Purification Rituals
One such purification ritual Dr. Mariano focused on is the nirangdin: the consecration of bull urine.
The Nirangdin
My father and uncle used to tease us kids about drinking bull urine at their Navjotes. My father was nine years old when he went through his in Lahore, part of British India back in 1944. They didn’t tell us kids when they were grossing us out that the bull urine undergoes 18 days of purification and consecration! That’s the nirangdin conducted by two priests who prepare for the ritual by being purified by two previously ritually purified priests.
The White Bull
The first step is to ensure they have a white bull. If they don’t have one, they’ll walk one from one temple to where it’s needed, with a bodyguard phalanx, on city roads at night when there’s not quite as much traffic. It helps that apparently Indian drivers don’t get all bent out of shape if some non-vehicle is on the road like they do here in North America. Mind you, they’re crazier!
Once the bull is borrowed or a calf purchased, it’s pampered, fed good food, and lives with goat buddies in a sheltered place. You’d think an 18-day ritual would in itself be the hardest part. Nope. The hardest part of the nirangdin, according to the priests, is acquiring the bull urine. The bull pees when it wants to pee, and no priest or assertive parent trying to schedule their child’s Navjote is gonna budge it.
Ontological Dynamism of the Nirangdin
Ontological dynamism comes into play here in a few ways. We have what needs to be consecrated moving places, whether from animal to human, from the bull to the Fire Temple to the home where it will be sipped. It also changes from regular animal pee to a consecrated liquid that Zoroastrians believe energizes and heals. It becomes a conduit between our physical reality and the divine world. Some sip it at home so as to receive blessings from the Divine. Sometimes the priests who conduct the nirangdin feel a gentle scent and sweet taste at ritual’s end, signifying the spiritual change in the bull urine. Others detect nothing.
Short Liturgies: Khorde Avesta and Yashts
The short liturgies come in numerous varieties — they’d be the fluid oral texts I wrote about earlier — but follow the same structure. An opening, a core, a closing. The core comprises the purpose of the short liturgy. The openings and closings are repeated in each liturgy, though they may differ between liturgies.
The Yashts comprise 22 hymns. Scholars debate whether there were originally 30 to coincide with the 30 days of the Zoroastrian monthly calendar, each of which has its own divine being who is prayed to. Or whether there were 16, and the Sasanians added more to reach 22 by writing new core material and/or copying and pasting from texts that existed at that time but are no longer extant today.
Classmates wondered if that meant we could write our own short liturgy by copying and pasting from other texts and repeating familiar openings and closings. It’s an intriguing thought.