Zoroastrianism: Ecology and Oral Traditions

Third in a series on the TISS-PARZOR Academic Programme in Culture & Civilisations: A Zoroastrian Perspective. Spotting interconnectedness. Living in harmony.

Dear Readers: I realize that going from practically no posts in 2025 to twice a week is a bit much. This sudden shift shall only be for the first quarter or so; I’ll probably return to regular programming after that. I apologize for the abrupt frequency increase, but I hope you find these posts enlightening!

Photo by Lisa Siefert on Unsplash

Ecology

During every lecture, Prof. Shernaz Cama emphasizes that Zoroastrianism is an ecological religion. This week, she defined ecology.

Ecology stems from the Greek word “oikos,” meaning home. In 1866, German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term “ecology” to convey the idea of interconnectedness, of how we all belong to one world, one home. Ecology means the study of Creation in which we all live. (Britannica puts it slightly differently.)

Patterns

All ancient cultures spot patterns in Nature. These patterns reveal our interconnectedness; sacred traditions arise out of understanding these patterns. If humanity had stuck to these traditions — if we had followed these patterns — we would not have kickstarted climate change during the industrial era, nor have polluted our environment, causing destruction, extinctions, and die-offs.

Secular traditions look at the surface of the planet and divide us into post-industrial nation states. (We can see how well that’s going, eh?)

Sacred traditions look deeper, down to the hidden source. They recognize the web we live in, and, in so doing, recognize everything is sacred. Religious texts and poets express this interconnectedness of us with the world. The Zoroastrian Spentas reflect our interconnectedness.

Wood Wide Web: Forests as Physical and Symbolic

As Prof. Cama was talking about the wood wide web, I thought of George Monbiot’s book Regenesis. I posted briefly on it on Bluesky while reading it for background research for The Soul’s Turning, novel three of The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy.

Monbiot begins his book with a poetic description of the interconnectedness of soil life. Lift up a section of grass and observe life teeming beneath our feet. The wood wide web, as Suzanne Simard coined it, connects trees and plants to each other. The web of interconnectedness allows the involved plants and animals to move water, share nutrients, and send warning alarms to each other, among other activities. The interconnectedness of trees, plants, macro-animals like worms and raccoons, micro-animals like bacteria, and more extends beyond the mycelium network. Once you absorb this tremendous knowledge, you realize that living the way we do — in the secular tradition — is not only against our human social biology but also anti-Nature.

Asha: Live in Cosmic Harmony with Natural and Spiritual Worlds

I’m not keeping up with the reading, and it’s affecting how well I can follow the lectures. Brain injury limits the amount of cognitive energy I have for this most difficult of cognitive tasks, especially when reading concept-rich subjects in PDF form. So I struggled to understand Asha during the lecture, but after reading part of one of last week’s readings, I understand better now.

Asha is one of the Spentas. Asha is Truth and the Cosmic Law and is represented by fire.

I think why Asha appeared at this point in the lecture is that this Spenta symbolizes the ecological sacred traditions of seeing the world as one united harmony. Unity doesn’t mean uniformity. Diversity within unity leads to a perfect whole. Perhaps Prof. Cama wanted us to hold in our head the concept of Asha so that we could see how the rest of what she taught contributes to or is part of harmony?

The path of Asha Spenta is hope and respect and is the eternal law of life that leads to the end times. It’s the heart of Zoroastrianism, which emphasizes purity (the good) and keeping away pollution (the bad).

“God has a divine plan and this world is ruled by the doctrine of Asha: cosmic harmony and righteousness. Truth is the only path to God, wisdom for the individual, lies in choosing the path of righteousness or Asha and rejecting the easier, more tempting path of Ahriman, which negates Ahura Mazda’s wisdom and goodness…Asha works to perfect the world….Complete freedom is given to the individual in the Gathas to choose the path he wants to follow. In this way the teachings of a Bronze Age prophet stay relevant even today.” Dr. Shernaz Cama, Zoroastrianism and the Five Basic Human Values.

Prof. Cama emphasized over and over how humans and Nature and the world are interconnected. The earth, air, and water are sacred and so must not be polluted. Well, we humans have collectively stomped on that law and turned more and more of the Earth into sewage and dead zones.

Plants have consciousness, and in the afterlife must not be hurt. The same with animals. This reminded me of my Philosophy of Mind readings on panpsychism.

“Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of physical reality.” ― Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness

I asked Prof. Cama how all living things have consciousness squares with eating animals. You may not know but Parsi food is famous for being meat-entric. A Zoroastrian vegetarian is almost unheard of, so I was heartened to see last week that at least one other member of the class is vegetarian like me.

Prof. Cama noted that Zoroastrianism originated out of the Central Steppes, which, being a desert, is inhospitable to plant life. Like with Canada’s Arctic, animals are the primary source of food. Zoroastrians put animals on the menu for survival’ sake. I didn’t discuss it in class, but I wonder about whether survival still applies in the parts of the world where we live, where being vegetarian is not only doable, but more and more regarded as part of climate action.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the call for taking meat off the table as a significant move to slow down climate change until I read several books by authors from Canada, the US, and UK, all of whom noted the contribution of sheep, beef, chickens, and cows (with sheep/lambs being the worst) to climate change. From memory (please look it up), animal farming is about 24% or the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gases.

Gardens and Flowers

Ancient cultures established groves; Zoroastrian cypress groves reflect our interconnectedness with the world. I found it interesting that among the many plants and trees Prof. Cama mentioned as originating from Zoroastrian gardeners, the cypress, a tree famous as belonging to Lebanon, came from our ancestors as well.

She packed so much information into her historic and contemporary overview, that most of it flew by me except two names: the rose and the tulip.

Unlike the rest of my family, I’m partial to growing roses. When I had health, energy, access to rich soil, and a garden with lots of sunlight, I grew tea roses, floribundas, and fragrant roses. I still have a few roses left that thrive despite my energy-deficient tending. I had assumed that my love of roses stemmed from my British side and my love of tulips from Canada’s famous tulip festival that the Dutch, in their gratitude for us liberating them in WWII, put on every year in Ottawa. But apparently Zoroastrians revere both and originated them millennia ago. So did I inherit this reverence through osmosis? DNA? Asha?

The 100-petal rose represents Din, a spirit. Unfortunately, I didn’t really understand who or what the Din represents.

Zoroastrians follow two calendars. The Solar Calendar has each day and each month named after an angel. A flower, plant, or herb represents each angel. Also, every Zoroastrian has a birth flower. I was not aware of either. More homework!

Water is Sacred

Purified water symbolizes the purified mind. It’s also safe to drink. See the last lecture on Zoroastrianism’s use of symbolism.

Ancient Zoroastrians developed a water conservation system that cooled the water and purified it. When they fled south to India, they recreated the Qanat system in a way that cooled their homes while providing fully-filtered safe drinking water and less-filtered water for the garden or other such uses. This Tanka method fell out of our knowledge until Parzor learnt of it remaining in a few places and Prof. Cama travelled to document and photograph it.

We Torontonians are spoiled living on the shores of one of the Great Lakes where we have access to abundant water for drinking and cooling our commercial buildings and having a city government committed to keeping our waters clean, including ensuring all our beaches attain Blue Flag status. Safe to swim in. But this ancient method seems like a solution to people living in hot climates with limited access to safe, drinking water.

Dogs

Parsis love dogs. Both my parents had dogs growing up, as did I and my father’s brother and cousin. I didn’t know that Zoroastrians cherish dogs because they were human beings’ first companion on the Steppes. Dogs provided warmth for our spirits and warned us of danger. Today, Zoroastrians honour the dog’s role by giving dogs the first morsel and providing food outside, in the same way we Torontonians put out water bowls for passing mutts.

Navroze

Prof Cama played a couple of videos during class and assigned several more for us to watch as homework. She spent the last half hour or so on the New Year celebration of Navroze and how the UN has designated it an intangible cultural heritage with countries around the world honouring it annually. In Toronto, the local news presents it as a Muslim festival. It’s not. This mischaracterization is a sign of cultural genocide. Prof. Cama and Parzor are spearheading a movement to correct this.