Hymns of Zoroaster

Most people have come across the name of Zoroaster, and there may be many who think of him as some sort of ancient oriental sage or guru, of dubious repute as a fount of secret wisdom or knowledge. This is the image in which he has often been presented in Western literature, from the ancient Greeks to Nietzsche. But if one strips away the legends and falsifications and goes back to the genuine evidence, a different picture emerges. Zoroaster stands out in his true colours as one of the greatest and most radical religious reformers in the history of the world. The noble religion that he founded in Iran over 2,500 years ago is still practised to this day. The number of its adherents is small, perhaps about 130,000, most of them in western India (Gujarat and Mumbai), with some smaller communities in Iran and in other countries around the world.¹ But if Zoroastrianism can no longer count as one of the world’s major faiths, it has the distinction of being one of the most ancient, much older than Christianity or Islam, older than Buddhism, older than anything one can properly call Judaism; only Hinduism can claim a greater antiquity. For more than a thousand years it was the official religion of a great empire.

Like other religions, it has evolved over time, and its founder’s original system has not been preserved in its pure and simple form. It has undergone much elaboration and accommodation to other traditions. However, we are in the fortunate position of being able to read Zoroaster’s message in his own words, in the poetic discourses with which he addressed his followers. They are not easy to understand, for reasons that will be explained. But the force of his intellect and the passion of his convictions speak to us across the millennia.

The sacred books of the Zoroastrians form an uneven collection known as the Avesta. They were composed at different dates, mainly before 300 BCE, in an Iranian language not otherwise documented and called by scholars Avestan.

But what has been preserved is only a fraction of what once existed. The canonical Avesta, as it was edited and arranged under the Sasanian kings of Iran between the third and sixth centuries CE, consisted of 21 volumes.

These were still current in the ninth century, and we have descriptions of their contents from Middle Persian sources of that time. But of this great body of writing only perhaps a quarter now remains, some of it in a fragmentary state.

The major components of the Avesta as it now exists, leaving aside various minor texts and fragments, are the Yasna, the Yashts, and the Vīdēvdāt or Vendīdād. The Yasna (‘Worship’) is a liturgical corpus, an assemblage of texts of different date recited by the priests in the divine service. The Yashts are hymns of praise, mostly metrical, addressed to various divinities and holy entities. The Vīdēvdāt (‘Law against demons’) is for the most part a sort of Zoroastrian Leviticus, a body of legal and ritual prescriptions.

The central core of the Yasna (chapters 28–53) consists of a series of more ancient texts. At their heart (chapters 35–41) sits the so-called Liturgy (Yasna) in Seven Chapters, a remarkable composition in hieratic prose created within the earliest Zoroastrian community not long after the prophet’s lifetime. Enclosing it are the five Gāthās (‘Songs’), which actually comprise seventeen separate poems, some 960 lines in all, arranged in five sequences according to metre. All the poems except the last (Yasna 53) were composed by Zoroaster himself.

These poems are the oldest texts in the Avesta and indeed the oldest in any Iranian language. Despite the many obscurities that hinder their interpetation, they are among the most precious legacies of antiquity.

Philologists prize them as unique documents of an archaic Iranian tongue, of high value for the reconstruction of the common Indo-Iranian and Indo-European languages from which it was descended. They merit the attention of the wider public as the authentic utterances of an extraordinary religious leader whose thought was far ahead of his time. What would Christians not give for such a collection of religious poems by Jesus?

Zoroaster and his world

Certain modern scholars have maintained that Zoroaster was not the name of a historical but of a mythical personage, a mere construct. This view can only be called perverse. A single, distinct personality speaks to us out of the poems, and in several places the poet names himself as Zoroaster, or rather (in his own language) Zarathushtra. In the one poem that is not by him, Yasna 53, he is named again as a real person, either still living or of recent memory. In the later parts of the Avesta as well as in other Zoroastrian literature he is frequently spoken of, with never a doubt as to his historical reality. His existence is as well authenticated as that of most people in antiquity.

There is nothing lofty or spiritual about his name, which apparently meant ‘Old-camel man’. He had the family surname Spitāma, which he shared with some other persons mentioned in the poems. We cannot pinpoint the region of Iran where the Spitāmas lived, but it certainly lay somewhere in the eastern territories that included modern Afghanistan and parts of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan. This was the homeland of the Avesta as a whole. The geographical references that occur in it all relate to these eastern lands,² and its language differs considerably from what we call Old Persian, which was the language of the south-west (Persia proper, the seat of the Achaemenid kings, the modern province of Fars). Not that the language of the Avesta is uniform:

the Gāthās and the Seven Chapters are in a different dialect from the rest – more archaic, but the differences are not all accounted for by development over time – and Zoroaster must have lived in a different area from those where the later Avestan texts took shape. According to a Zoroastrian tradition that may go back to one of the lost books of the Avesta, he came from a district called Ragha, apparently to be located in Badakhshan in the north-eastern corner of Afghanistan, or in ancient terms eastern Bactria.³

As to when he lived, scholars are divided between those who put him in the seventh or sixth century BCE and those who uphold a much higher dating, around 1000 BCE or even earlier. The latter party take their stand on the fact that the language of the Gāthās is approximately as archaic as the related Indian dialect in which the hymns of the Rigveda are composed; these are themselves not closely dated but are conventionally assigned to the period 1500–1000. (1200–900 might be more realistic.) But the argument is not at all reliable, as an archaic form of speech may maintain itself for centuries with little change in an out-of-the-way region such as Zoroaster’s homeland may have been. One cannot take a body of texts in an otherwise undocumented language and declare on linguistic grounds that they must belong to the second and not the first millennium BCE. On general grounds it seems unlikely that Zoroaster should be separated from the rest of Iranian history by such a wide time gap.

The latest possible date for his activity is the mid sixth century BCE, as the religion he created, defined by the worship of Ahura Mazdā instead of the traditional Indo-Iranian deities, is that of the Achaemenid kings of Persia from the time of Darius I, who ruled from 522 to 486. Mary Boyce has argued that it was also the religion of Darius’ royal predecessors Cyrus and Cambyses, but this is questionable.⁴ It may have been Darius’ family religion, as his father Vishtāspa (the Hystaspes of Greek authors) had the same name as a figure famous in Zoroastrian tradition, the Vishtaaspa whom the prophet himself names as his principal champion. There are four possible explanations for this: that the two men were the same; that Darius’ father was a later member of the same family as Zoroaster’s patron; that he was of an unrelated family but named after the Zoroastrian; or that the coincidence of names was purely fortuitous. The first cannot be right, as the authors of the later Avesta who celebrated Vishtaaspa’s crusading battles could not possibly have ignored it if his son had become master of the Persian empire.

And if he had been a forebear of Darius’ father, Darius would have known it and would have included him in the line of his ancestors that he records in his great inscription at Bisitun. On the other hand, it might seem too much of a coincidence if a Zoroastrian king’s father happened to be called Vishtāspa without reference to Zoroaster’s famous patron. The inference is that Vishtāspa’s father Arshāma (Arsames), who presumably bestowed that name on him, was already a Zoroastrian.

How much earlier are we to place Zoroaster? The Avesta itself, or what we have of it, gives no chronological indications or historical anchorage.

However, in a lost book of the Avesta, cited by the tenth-century Arabic writer

, Zoroaster was represented as having prophesied that the empire would be destroyed after three hundred years but that the religion would last for a thousand. This underlies a chronological scheme reflected in other Arabic and Pahlavi sources, according to which Zoroaster was born, or attained enlightenment, three hundred years before the conquest of Iran by Alexander the Great (330 BCE). The prophecy must have been invented, shortly after Alexander’s conquest, by some Zoroastrian who was dismayed by the fall of the Achaemenid empire but fortified himself with the confidence that the religion would continue for centuries into the future. He evidently thought of the prophet as having lived a century before the accession of Darius, around the time of the end of the Assyrian empire and the rise of the Median. We do not know the basis for this reckoning – there is no historical plausibility in the notion of some scholars that from the time of the prophet the Zoroastrian priests had carefully kept a tally of the passing years – but it yields a dating that sits well with the rest of our evidence and may not be far wrong.

It receives some support from another line of argument. Already in the fifth century (if not the sixth) Zoroastrian theologians had constructed a chronological scheme according to which the struggle between the good and evil principles, Ahura Mazdā and Angra Manyu, was being played out over a period of twelve thousand years, divided into four equal parts. At the end of the first three thousand years the material world was created, together with all people’s fravashis or external souls. After another six thousand years Zoroaster’s good religion won acceptance.⁵

In the remaining three thousand years Angra Manyu will be finally defeated, and thereafter everything will remain perfect and unchanging. Zoroaster then, in this scheme, appears at the start of the tenth millennium of the world. The creator of the system almost certainly considered himself and his contemporaries to be living in that same millennium, and not more than half way through it. Such is the viewpoint reflected in a late Jewish text, 4

For the world has lost its youth, the times begin to wax old. For the world age is divided into twelve parts; nine (parts) of it are passed already, and the half of the tenth part; and there remain of it two (parts), besides the half of the tenth part.

This must derive directly or indirectly from a Zoroastrian source, no doubt of post-Alexandrian date, in which Zoroaster was conceived to have lived about half a millennium previously.

Classical Greek writers who refer to Zoroaster put him at various dates and clearly had no solid information. Some authors of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE had the idea that he had lived six thousand years before.⁶ This is an impossibly early dating, but we can see where it must have come from: from a misunderstanding of that Zoroastrian chronology, in which the prophet’s soul was created at the end of the first trimillennium, six thousand years before his birth. Other Greeks thought of him as having lived much later, long after the Trojan War.

Aristotle’s pupil Aristoxenus represented him as having given instruction to Pythagoras in Babylon, sometime in the early or mid sixth century; this was a fiction of Aristoxenus’, who was not bound by any great historical scruples, but he must have thought of Zoroaster as a figure from the time of the Median empire. Others put him a couple of centuries earlier, in the time of the legendary Assyrian king Ninos and queen Semiramis. This is part of a novelistic, pseudo-historical construction in which the Assyrians invade Bactria, where Zoroaster is king at the time.

The society reflected in the Gāthās is loosely structured. There is no sense of a central imperial authority. Zoroaster speaks in several places of a hierarchy of social units, starting with the

(family, clan) and rising to the

(local community) and aryaman- (a wider network or alliance, perhaps something like a tribe).⁷ He has a separate scale for the domains within which personal authority

may be exercised, from the individual household

through the

(manor) to the

(settlement) and the

(region).⁸ The last corresponds to the word later used by Darius and his successors for the provinces into which their empire was divided. It is the largest political unit in Zoroaster’s world. He speaks critically of the ‘rulers of the region’ or ‘of the regions’.⁹ But they appear as rather dim and distant figures.

It is a pastoral society in which the cow and its products have an important place. But the dairy-farmer’s peaceful existence is threatened by violent intrusions. In one of his most striking poems (Yasna 29) Zoroaster represents the cow’s soul as complaining to the powers above of the cruel aggression to which she is subject. It is not her righteous-living herdsman that is to blame, but others who, guided by priests of a false religion, drive her off and condemn her to be sacrificed.¹⁰

This is the most specific of the ills in his society that Zoroaster condemns and would like to cure. If he cannot achieve this, it is because he lacks temporal power; he has not got the wealth and influence and the numbers of supporters that would enable him to change things.¹¹ There is thus a political element in his aspirations. He hopes to convert people to the true way by the persuasive force of his message. At the same time he dreams of a power centre from which he could impose what he sees as the divine will. In the end he seems to have had some success, finding a strong patron in Vishtaaspa and establishing a community of the faithful large enough to endure and prosper.

Zoroaster’s religion

What was the new religion that he preached? First we must try to form a concept of the older religion that he aimed to supplant. The evidence for it is largely indirect. Besides hints in the Gāthās, it is a matter of inference from the related culture of Vedic India and from fragmented survivals in later Iran.

The picture is of a traditional polytheism inherited from the time of common Indo-Iranian culture in the earlier second millennium BCE. Some of the same gods appear in both Iran and India. One of the more prominent Vedic deities, Mitra the god of contracts, was also worshipped in Iran (as Mithra) and is the subject of a major hymn in the Avesta (Yasht 10). In other Yashts there are references to the wind god Vayu and to the mysterious deity known as the Grandson of the Waters; these too are familiar from the Rigveda. Two further Vedic divinities, Aryaman and Narāsamsa, appear elsewhere in the Avesta as objects of reverence. Others again such as Indra, Nāsatya, and Śarva are named in the Vīdēvdāt as demons, evidently still respected in parts of Iran but rejected by pious Zoroastrians.

Some forms of worship too were common to both countries. The sacral fire had an honoured place in cult in both, and so did the exhilarating drink made from the pressed-out juice (Vedic soma-, Avestan haoma-) of a certain mountain plant.

There were cultic personnel in both countries with similar titles: the fire-priest (atharvan-,

), the libation-priest (hotar-, zaotar-), the eulogist (stotar-, staotar-), and the poet-seer (

). In the cults of both countries the cow was highly esteemed, and importance was attached in both to the holy utterance (mantra-,

The traditional gods were known in India as devas, from an ancient Indo-European word *deiwos meaning ‘celestial one’. Another honorific title, applied in India to a secondary group of deities, was asura-, ‘lord’. Both terms were current in pre-Zoroastrian Iran too, where they appeared respectively as daiva- (in Avestan daēva-) and ahura-. Zoroaster promoted a new set of beings as the proper object of worship. It was not appropriate to call them daēvas, as they did not belong to the traditional pantheon of ‘celestials’. So he classified them as ahuras and, with the bold decisiveness of the true revolutionary, relegated the entire category of daēvas to the status of demons unworthy of worship.

Chief among his Lords was Ahura Mazdā, the Lord who takes thought or pays attention, or as I have chosen to render him, the Mindful Lord.¹² This is a deity identified not by an opaque conventional name, like the old gods, but by reference to his essential quality of attentiveness or intelligence. His intelligence is creative and supervisory. He created this world, or at any rate what is good in it, by means of his thought.¹³ He observes men’s moral deliberations and choices with a watchful eye, and he cannot be deceived.¹⁴

He communicates his wisdom through visions and utterances that Zoroaster receives; men are his messengers.¹⁵

Zoroaster addresses Ahura Mazdā constantly throughout his poems. In addressing him, however, he very often uses pronouns and verbs in the second person plural, as I have made clear in the translation by distinguishing scrupulously between Thou and Ye. These plurals are not merely honorific.

Their reference is made plain by two passages where the prophet speaks of ‘Mazdā and Ahuras’, in other words ‘Mazdā and the other Lords’.¹⁶ Mazdā, then, is the leader of a concordant group, and it is a matter of indifference whether one addresses them collectively or Mazdā individually.

Zoroaster nowhere identifies the other Ahuras explicitly, but we can assume that he is thinking of certain divine entities which he constantly associates with Mazdā and sometimes addresses in the vocative. Their names are the names of abstract qualities, mostly of an ethical nature: Right (

); Good Thought (Vohu manah); Piety (ārmati); Bounteous Will (Spənta manyu); Dominion (

). These are all things that human beings may have in themselves, and Zoroaster often uses the words with reference to his own or other people’s thinking and conduct, besides treating them as personified beings with an independent existence. Sometimes it is not clear which way to take them, and whether to translate them with a capital or a lower-case initial. When they are personified they can be treated like the conventional gods of poetry and represented as speaking to one another or to mankind.¹⁷

Right had long been recognized in Indo-Iranian religion as a cosmic power. The Avestan

is etymologically identical with the Vedic

, a divine principle that governs the natural world, for example the course of the sun, as well as representing truth or rightness in the human sphere. Zoroaster made it the defining principle of his religion. The antithesis of Right and Wrong encapsulates the whole of his moral concern. The human race is divided between the

, the possessors or followers of Right, and the drəgvants, those who belong to Wrong. But

is subordinated to Ahura Mazdā, who is called his father.¹⁸

Mazdā is likewise the father of Good Thought (also called Best Thought).¹⁹ This is what people are urged to cultivate above all else. Often it is coupled with good speech and good action; Zoroaster was so far as we know the first to formulate the triad ‘thought, word, and deed’. Good Thought is the one most emphasized, as it is the foundation for the other two. Zoroaster sometimes speaks of Good Thought’s own utterances or actions (enactments). Its opposite, Bad or Worst Thought, is also mentioned, but not as a divine power that people might invoke.

Zoroaster’s emphasis on mental attitude and moral deliberation also finds expression in the figures of Piety (ārmati) and Bounteous Will. ārmati corresponds to Vedic aramati- and means something like appropriate thinking, rightmindedness, devotion to what is good or holy. Spənta Manyu, the Bounteous or Liberal or Positive Will, has a twin brother who is his opposite: Angra Manyu, the Hostile or Negative Will. Zoroaster sets out his doctrine of the two Wills most explicitly in Yasna 30. He describes how they tussle for a man’s soul, making their voices heard in his mind, and how his choice between them determines his ultimate fate. In another passage about inner voices it is Piety who debates with the man’s will as he ponders his options.²⁰ The doctrinal variant is of no significance, as the basic idea is the same. The epithet spənta- (related to Russian svyatoy ‘holy, saintly’) is often applied to Piety herself, as well as to Ahura Mazdā and to the man who is bounteous or liberal in his actions. The Bounteous Will is also a feature of Ahura Mazdā, since his whole order is good and a manifestation of his liberal or bounteous nature. He is praised as the father of this Will, as he is elsewhere of Right and Good Thought.²¹

Dominion (

) is again a property of Ahura Mazdā as well as being something that humans aspire to. Mazdā’s dominion, however, is not total and absolute. It is represented as something that mankind must fight to promote.

It is strengthened, and he is increased, when they follow Piety and Good Thought.²² It is a striking feature of Zoroaster’s religion that his Ahuras and their antagonists the Daēvas do not live in a separate world and are not self-sufficient. They operate on earth through their human adherents, and the extent of their power and authority depends on their success in getting people to listen to them.

Besides the various personifications, Right, Good Thought, and the rest, certain other divine figures with self-explanatory names are mentioned here and there in the Gāthās: the Maker of the Cow; the Shaper (of everything); the Creator of Wrong. These designations avoid giving specific answers to the questions of who made the cow or created Wrong (though in other passages Zoroaster is prepared to identify the cow’s maker as Ahura Mazdā or the Bounteous Will).²³ When the prophet declares at the end of Yasna 51, ‘those (immortals) who have been and are, I will worship under their own names’, he means that he uses names that correspond to the reality of the divinity in question instead of the old mythological names that mostly conveyed no meaning and appeared to be arbitrary.

If the world that Mazdā created in the beginning had been preserved intact, all would be well. But it has become corrupted through the actions of followers of Wrong, such as the mythical Yima who first slaughtered the cow and portioned out its meat for human consumption.²⁴ Such people are ‘destroyers of this existence’.²⁵ We must strive to restore the perfection of the First Existence, the world as it was originally. Perhaps this can be achieved in our lifetime, perhaps it will take longer. ‘May we be the ones who will make this world splendid.’²⁶ The follower of Right who contributes towards this goal is awarded the honourable title of

, ‘healer of the world’, or

, ‘(would-be) strengthener, enhancer, fosterer, promoter’ (of the religion, and so of Mazdā’s dominion).²⁷

Zoroaster is not interested only in moral welfare; he also wants physical well-being to go with it. Among the things that he represents Ahura Mazdā as having at his disposal and dispensing to those who deserve it there appears repeatedly the pair haurvatāt- and amərətatāt-, often misleadingly translated as ‘wholeness and immortality’. ‘Wholeness’ is literally correct, but it refers to haleness of body, good health and freedom from sickness. As for amərətatāt-, while it corresponds etymologically to immort(ali)ty, it means literally ‘not dying’, and what Zoroaster is hoping for is not eternal life but continuing life, that is, not to die before his time. It is a boon for this world, not the next. In other passages he speaks of ‘long life’.²⁸

He does have a doctrine about continuing existence after death, but it is not formulated in terms of ‘eternal life’. Like many another religious leader, he reinforces his moral message by giving notice of contrasting fates awaiting the good and the wicked. The soul of the departed will arrive, with a clear or a troubled conscience, at a narrow bridge or causeway, the Arbiter’s Crossing.²⁹ There he must make his declaration to Ahura Mazdā, who will decide his fate by means of an ordeal involving fire and molten metal.³⁰ This is the ‘Supplication’ or ‘Reckoning’.³¹ The righteous will dwell with Ahura Mazdā and Good Thought in a place of joy and radiance,³² whereas those found unworthy will endure aeons of darkness and woe, with only foul food to eat.³³

The alternatives of light and darkness seem again to echo a traditional concept.³⁴ At the same time the radiant brightness promised to the good corresponds to an intrinsic feature of Ahura Mazdā’s realm. Zoroaster associates the activities of Right and Good Thought with the daylight and the sun. They are ‘the gladness beheld by the daylight’, ‘these amenities permeating the world of light’. Right itself is ‘sunlit’, whereas

That is the man who perverts good repute, who declares that the worst thing to behold with the eyes is the cow, and the sun.³⁵

Frashaushtra, one of Zoroaster’s friends, is said to ‘expose his body to the Good Religion’, as if to the sunlight (51. 17).

There is an impressive clarity and simplicity in Zoroaster’s religion as it appears in the Gāthās. It is not cluttered up with mystical or theological baggage. Its pantheon is not made up of assorted characters from an obscure prehistoric mythology but of beings with clearly defined identities and properties. Its ethics is plain and straightforward. It is concerned not with irrational rules and taboos but with easily understood moral and intellectual values. The emphasis is on divine and human sapience and on man’s responsibility for the choices he makes between good and bad.

Zoroaster as poet and preacher

As the self-conscious creator of a new faith – ‘the religion of mine that I am to perfect’ (44. 9) – Zoroaster was free to define his own role and status in it. He invented no novel title for himself but drew on the existing language of cult. He calls himself a zaotar- or minister, and a rishi or poet-prophet; he is Ahura Mazdā’s ‘praiser’, and his ‘mantra-man’, that is, the one who receives and passes on his prescripts.³⁶ These are loosely descriptive terms, not formal positions in a church. Zoroaster does not represent himself as officiating at ritual activities. Although he sometimes uses the language of liturgy, speaking of praying ‘with outstretched hands’ or of making dedications and offerings, this all seems to be meant figuratively, not literally.³⁷ In several places he refers to a maga-, or great maga-, a word that appears to signify some kind of sacramental event, but again it is not clear that a specific ritual is in question. It seems in some cases to be something that is being prepared for rather than already in progress.³⁸

If the Gāthās were not performed at a ritual, what was their intended function?

Under what conditions were they heard? For all the innumerable addresses to Mazdā and other Ahuras, these are not private devotions that Zoroaster uttered in solitude to his gods. He meant them for a human audience. Nor is he fulminating at a hostile crowd of unbelievers and sceptics. In a number of poems he addresses his followers, whom he characterizes as

, people eager to come from near and from far.³⁹ He speaks of coming before them to proclaim his gospel; ‘facing the zealous I will be heard in the house of song.’⁴⁰ They are the people he refers to as his ‘supporters’ (28. 2) and as ‘the men of Observance’ (48. 10, if rightly interpreted).

In other passages he addresses individuals, some of whom are of his own Spitāma family. At 46. 15 it is the Haecataspa Spitāmas; the two sons of Hugava to whom he turns in the following stanzas, Frashaushtra and Djāmaaspa, were perhaps allied by marriage. At 51. 16–19 they appear again beside Madyaimāha Spitāma and the Kavi Vishtaaspa, Zoroaster’s patron.⁴¹

What I am calling for convenience Zoroaster’s ‘hymns’, then, may be characterized as songs or poems that he sang or recited at gatherings of his family and/or his followers, and in which he voiced his devotional and other aspirations. Some of the gatherings may have been intimate, others larger; at 34. 1 he speaks of ‘us in our great numbers’, and even if he is including absent with present supporters, it seems likely that there were occasions when all of them who were able came together to hear their leader’s poetic discourses.

The poems are cast in what were no doubt traditional metrical forms, showing a distant affinity to those of the Rigveda. They are all composed in stanzas of three, four, or five lines. Each stanza is usually self-contained in sense, but occasionally a complex statement is spread across two or more. In the three-line stanzas quite often the first two lines make up one sentence and the third another. Each line is divided by a caesura into two members or cola (or in Yasna 53 three), and in each colon the number of syllables is more or less fixed.

At a more ancient stage of Iranian versification there had probably been some regular scheme governing the placing of long and short syllables, especially at the end of each line, as in the Vedic hymns, but in the Gāthās it is hard to detect anything of the kind. All we can say is that there is a strong tendency for words of three or more syllables to be put at the end of a colon.

In the Yasna the poems appear arranged in five sequences (the five Gāthās) according to the stanza-form used in each:

We cannot assume that this arrangement goes back to Zoroaster himself or that it corresponds to the order of composition. It is true that the first poem appears to begin programmatically, anticipating some of the main themes of other poems, and that in two cases (Yasna 31 and 48) a poem seems to start from where the previous one ended. But elsewhere poems that belong together thematically are more widely separated, and we cannot follow a continuous thread of development.

The diction of the hymns contains traditional elements, as is evident from the fact that some expressions have Vedic parallels. Zoroaster’s general tone is lofty, but he does not always avoid direct and earthy expressions when he wants to condemn something. He resorts readily to personification.

We have seen that entities such as Good Thought and Piety are important in his theology, but other personified abstracts that appear in single contexts seem to be momentary creations of poetic style rather than of settled religious doctrine: Contempt, Compliance, Reward, Silent Meditation, Good Dispensation.⁴²

It throws an interesting sidelight on Zoroaster’s society that he several times draws imagery from the racecourse or from speeding horses.⁴³ His commonest images, however, are those of the house and the path. He speaks of the house of Good Thought, the house of Worst Thought, the house of Wrong, the house of Ahura Mazdā, and the house of song;⁴⁴ of the path or paths of Good Thought, of enhancement, of enlightenment, of enablement, of the religion itself; of the path for the soul to follow.⁴⁵ Another image that reflects his standing concerns is that of the ‘pasture of Right and Good Thought’ (33. 3).

The Seven Chapters

The Liturgy in Seven Chapters is in the same archaic form of Avestan as the Gāthās and must have been composed not very long afterwards, though probably after Zoroaster’s death.

He speaks as their representative and on their behalf. The sacred fire is burning on the altar, and libations are being made.

The style is formal and elevated, the structure carefully shaped. The first chapter is an affirmation of what the Zoroastrians stand for and of their commitment to Ahura Mazdā and Right. In the second chapter the sacred fire is invoked as a manifestation of Mazdā and his Bounteous Will. His praises are developed in the third chapter, with reference to his creation of the earth, the waters, the plants, and all things good. From here the scope widens: the earth and the waters themselves receive praises and worship, followed by the Cow’s soul (canonized by Zoroaster in Yasna 29) and all other righteous souls, human or animal. When all the objects of worship have been named and summed up in a general formula, the focus comes back to Ahura Mazdā, and in the two last chapters a series of prayers is addressed to him, with pointed allusions to the offerings being made.

It is a marvellously sunny text: there is no reference to any difficulties faced by the community, and only the slightest hint of anything or anyone bad in the world. This is one thing that differentiates it from the Gāthās. Another is the extension of worship beyond Zoroaster’s Ahuras to the earth, the waters, and the entire horde of the souls of the righteous.

What we are seeing here are developments shaped by two factors: on the one hand the acceptance of some elements of traditional popular religion into Zoroastrian cult, and on the other the impulse to integrate and justify them. People had long worshipped the earth and the waters; here they are worshipped as parts of Mazdā’s creation, the female spirits who inhabit the earth are turned into personifications of aspects of Zoroastrian cult,⁴⁶ and the waters become ‘the Lord’s wives’. People had long invoked the souls of the ancestors; here the concept of the good souls of former mortals, which still have power to confer benefit, is expanded to take in the souls of those still living and those yet to be born, all the righteous ones, that is, together with the famous Cow’s soul from the Gāthās.

Three detached mantras

At the end of chapter 27 of the Yasna, just before the Gāthās, there appear three independent stanzas, unconnected with one another, that are clearly of early date. They are revered by Zoroastrians as sacred mantras and have been placed where they are for that reason. The first may well go back to Zoroaster himself: it is in the same metrical form as the seven poems of Yasna 28–34, and its thought and language are in complete accord with those of the Gāthās. It may perhaps be a stanza detached from one of the longer poems (though there is no obvious place where it fits), or it may be all that remains of a poem otherwise lost. I render it as follows (27. 13):

The second is couched in equally pure archaic language, but the metrical form (4 + 5, 4 + 4, 3 + 5 syllables) does not accord with any of the Gāthās, and the rather sophisticated idea expressed, that Right sets its own standard of Right, is not one that Zoroaster himself voices, though he would surely not have contested it. It may have been composed by one of his early disciples. There are ambiguities in the syntax and various interpretations are possible. Mine is (27. 14):

The third is a little less archaic in its linguistic form, and the metrical structure is again uncanonical (5 + 7 + 7, 4 + 4, 4 + 4). It clumsily adapts a stanza of Zoroaster’s, perhaps misconstruing it in taking ‘the Mindful Lord’ as the subject of ‘knows’ (51. 22), while the naming of both male and female entities as objects of worship echoes the Seven Chapters (39. 2–3). It runs (27.

That one of the Beings in whose worship the Mindful Lord knows is the better (interest)

Subsequent developments

As was noted earlier, Zoroaster complains more than once of his weakness and lack of political power. At one point he is alienated from his surroundings and wondering where he can escape:

He knows that if his religion is to take root he needs to find someone of influence who will take it up and promote it.

He found the patron he sought in the Kavi Vishtaaspa, who as we have seen may have been a relative. The title kavi- means something like ‘seer, poet’. In two passages (32. 14–15, 46. 11) Zoroaster speaks critically of the Kavis as a class associated with the Karpans (a kind of priest); but he implies that they have been led astray by the followers of Wrong rather than being intrinsically evil. Vishtaaspa at any rate is exempt from his strictures. He is acclaimed as a righteous man and as Zoroaster’s ‘ally for the great maga-’ (46. 14).

It is not clear what was the nature and basis of Vishtaaspa’s power in the land; perhaps it was simply wealth, perhaps it was the religious authority he possessed as a Kavi. The later Avesta tells of battles that he fought and defeats that he inflicted on various rivals.⁴⁷ If these stories have any historical basis, the inference would be that he had a fighting force at his disposal and used it to extend his control over a widening area.

This would have given Zoroaster’s religion a foothold in the region. It may have spread further through missionary activity. The language of the Gāthās, in its transmitted form, perhaps contains clues to the route by which the faith spread to western Iran. It is coloured by traces of dialects of both the south-east (Arachosia, Drangiana) and the south-west (Persis or Persia proper). (See the map overleaf.) That suggests that the poems, and the religion founded upon them, were carried from their area of origin by the southern route via Kerman to the heart of Persis. This happened, we may presume, before the time of Darius’ grandfather Arsames, if the surmise that he was a Zoroastrian is correct. From Persis the religion presently spread northwards into Media, to become the business of the priestly caste known as the Magi.

Meanwhile in the eastern territories, which by now must have been well seeded with Zoroastrian communities, priests were adding to the body of hymnic and liturgical compositions, producing the Yashts and other material that would eventually find a place in the Avesta. Their outlook on the world remained a provincial one. They took no notice of the momentous political developments taking place in the west, and so far as the surviving Avesta is concerned the Persian empire might never have existed. But while they continued to recite the Gāthās and the Seven Chapters, their religion was no longer quite what Zoroaster had taught. No new religion has the power to sweep away everything that has gone before, or so thoroughly to brainwash those who accept it that all their previous pieties are swept away. Compromises emerge between the new and the old. Already in the Seven Chapters we have seen some accommodation to popular religious sentiment, with worship extended not just to the abstract principles celebrated in the prophet’s poems but also to the numinous elements of the physical world, the Earth, the Waters, the souls of all good people and of all harmless animals. In later Zoroastrianism such objects of veneration were formally recognized, not as Ahuras or Daēvas, but as yazatas, ‘worshipful ones’.

The traditional gods were supposed to have been done away with, but in the Younger Avesta reverence is shown towards such figures as Mithra, the Sun and Moon, the wind god Vayu, the river goddess Ardvī Anāhitā, and others.⁴⁸ This is all in accord with Herodotus’ statement (1. 131) that the Persians sacrifice to ‘Zeus’

(this must stand for Ahura Mazdā), whom they identify with the bright sky, and to Sun, Moon, Earth, Fire, Water, and Winds. By the later fifth century even royalty openly sanctioned such worship. Darius II (423–404) recognized the cult of Anāhitā, and his son Artaxerxes II (404–358) promoted her worship throughout the empire; in his inscriptions he includes the prayer ‘May Auramazdā, Anāhitā, and Mithra protect me from all evil’.

Meanwhile an important modification had been made to Zoroaster’s theology to deal with an anomaly that we noted earlier. The prophet had presented Spənta Manyu and Angra Manyu, the Bounteous and the Hostile Will, as a pair of twins, while in another poem Ahura Mazdā was called the father of the Bounteous Will. Was he then also the father of the Hostile Will? This was an unwelcome implication, since he was wholly good. A revised genealogy was accordingly produced in which Angra Manyu became the twin brother of Ahura Mazdā himself, both of them being represented as sons of the impartial deity Time (Zruvān). The dualism inherent in Zoroaster’s thought was thus made absolute: a good and an evil power had existed side by side from the beginning, in constant conflict. This remained the fundamental doctrine of most later Zoroastrianism, in which the names of Ahura Mazdā and Angra Manyu lived on as Ohrmazd and Ahriman. The revised theology was bound up with the 12,000-year chronological scheme described earlier.

It was not only Zoroaster’s theology that underwent modification and development after his death. Types of ritual flourished that he had openly condemned: the sacrifice of cattle, and the preparation and consumption of haoma. Evidently it was the sheer ethical force of his religion that powered its diffusion, the gospel of the Mindful Lord, Right, and Good Thought, and not the appeal of its austere forms of worship. Older practices continued and were integrated into Zoroastrian orthodoxy.

As the dominant religion of the Persian empire, upheld by the Achaemenid kings, Mazdaism flourished for two centuries, until the conquest by Alexander in 330 BCE. That brought the empire under Greek rule for some eighty years, and then it came under a Parthian dynasty, that of the Arsacids, which lasted till 226 CE. Little is known in detail about the fortunes of Zoroastrianism during these centuries. It survived, with much of its ancient literature, but it probably did not develop much, as the organization of the empire was less centralized than under the Achaemenids and local traditions of worship were rather left to look after themselves.

There is evidence of increased official interest in the first or second century CE, when one or other of the various kings named Vologeses is said to have sent out instructions to each province to preserve its Zoroastrian texts and teachings as it had received them.

When the Arsacids gave way to the Sasanians, a royal line from Persia, the state took a firmer grip on religion. The first king, Ardashir I, is reported to have ordered that all written or oral records of Zoroastrian teaching be gathered together from all over Iran. His high priest Tansar then reviewed them and decided which ones were to be regarded as creditworthy. This was at least a step towards the establishment of a canonical Avesta.

For four centuries Zoroastrianism enjoyed its high summer of state-backed prestige, until in the mid seventh century Mesopotamia and Iran fell to the invading Muslim Arabs. This event did not destroy the native religion at once, but it dealt it a critical blow from which it never recovered. The cards were now stacked against it. Its adherents were suffered to exist but discriminated against in various ways, and increasing numbers of them converted to Islam.

Priestly study of the Avesta and religious writing in Pahlavi still continued for many generations. Much of our knowledge of Zoroastrian theology and legend is derived from Pahlavi works written in the ninth century or thereabouts. But there was little original writing after that.

Further invasions of Iran by the Seljuk Turks and the Mongols between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries caused more extensive losses, including probably the disappearance of the greater part of the Avesta.

By this time a group of Zoroastrian émigrés had established themselves in Gujarat, which remained from then on the safest redoubt of the faith.

The transmission of the Gāthās

When we study the Greek or Latin classics we are dealing with works that have come down to us through a continuous written tradition. In most cases the manuscripts we have are no earlier than the Middle Ages, but they are copies of copies that go back ultimately to an original text written down or dictated by the ancient author. With the Gāthās the situation is similar in one regard, in that we are dependent on manuscripts, the oldest of which were written in the fourteenth century, but in other respects the case is very different. The written tradition in which these manuscripts stand began only in the Sasanian period. It is quite uncertain whether the Gāthās had ever been written down before then. The primary medium by which they were preserved for more than a thousand years from Zoroaster’s time was oral transmission.

This is an astonishing fact, but a fact it almost certainly is. What is especially astonishing is the extraordinary fidelity with which, to all appearances, the original text was transmitted. It underwent gradual changes of pronunciation over the centuries, resulting in some superficial disruption of the metres. But the archaic vocabulary and grammar, only half understood by those who recited and heard the poems, were preserved intact.

Such corruptions of the text as we can identify seem in nearly all cases to have arisen only during the period of written transmission.

The explanation of this state of affairs is that in Iran, as in India, it became the rule at an early date that priests committed large quantities of their sacred texts to memory, using various mnemonic techniques to ensure the strictest verbal accuracy, and recited or chanted them on the appropriate ritual occasions. In India the Vedas have been preserved in this way for the greater part of three thousand years. What proves the accuracy of their trans- mission is that a whole system of grammar and a whole system of accentuation, already obsolete in the classical Sanskrit of 500 BCE but authenticated by modern comparative philology, have survived in perfect shape. As with the Gāthās, changes of pronunciation over time have caused slight disturbance to the metres, but otherwise the text appears to be in virtually pristine condition.

In the light of our observations on the nature and occasion of Zoroaster’s poems, it does not seem likely that he himself intended them to be memorized and perpetuated. It will have been his early disciples who decided that they should be regularly recited in association with the Seven Chapters, partly before, partly after. In this way the core of the traditional liturgy was established, and it became incumbent upon the officiating priests to know the texts by heart.

There was no possibility of writing them down because the country they lived in was illiterate. Until the Parthian period there existed, with one exception, no means of writing down any Iranian language. The exception was the customized cuneiform syllabary which the Achaemenid kings from the time of Darius I used for their royal inscriptions; but this had no wider currency. Late Zoroastrian writers have stories of how the Avesta was originally written down at the behest of Vishtaaspa, or how one of the later Dariuses had it inscribed on oxhides with gold ink in two copies, and how these ancient volumes were destroyed by Alexander. But these are certainly Sasanian myths, invented at a time when a tradition of written scriptures seemed a necessity for any respectable ancient religion.

Under the Arsacids the Aramaic alphabet was adapted for the writing of Parthian and other Middle Iranian languages. It is possible that some Avestan texts could have been written down in such a script. But it would have been an inadequate medium, and the written copies would have been of service only as an aide-mémoire for priests who had learned the texts orally. There is no reason to think that an entire written Avesta was produced at this period, or indeed that there was yet a recognized canon of texts constituting an Avesta. It was the Sasanian kings, so far as we know, who set in motion the project of drawing up such a canon and recording the constituent works in writing. This began, as mentioned above, under Ardashir in the third century. But the task of reducing the mass of material to order and producing an authoritative text extended over many generations. The oral tradition still retained the highest prestige. It was only in the reign of Khosrow I (531–578) that the high priest Veh-Shabuhr produced a definitive edition of the Avesta in 21 volumes and secured royal approval for it.

To record it in writing a special alphabet had been devised, and this is what is used in our manuscripts. It was based on the Pahlavi alphabet, but the number of characters was more than doubled, to a total of 53, in order to reflect meticulously every distinct phonetic nuance that was audible in the oral recitations by the priests. These nuances could not have been expressed in any earlier script, which proves that the Avesta text produced at this time was not dependent on a previous written tradition but newly based on the current oral tradition. The priests’ pronunciation, however, had gradually changed over the centuries, without their being aware of it, to a point where it would have sounded very strange to Zoroaster. This Sasanian pronunciation is what our written text reflects. It is as if the Canterbury Tales had been been transmitted by purely oral means down to the twentieth century, the Middle English grammar and vocabulary being faithfully preserved but the pronunciation having evolved into something like a modern London accent, and the text so recited had then been recorded in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Western scholars have developed their own system for transliterating the Avestan script into an extended Latin alphabet. The extra symbols needed give it a singularly outlandish appearance. Here is how the first stanza of Yasna 28 appears in Avestan script (which runs from right to left) and in a modern edition:

The surviving manuscripts of the Yasna come partly from Iran and partly from India. They offer a virtually uniform text, the divergences among them being practically confined to trivial matters of orthography or casual error.

However, the lack of serious variation does not mean that this text is reliable, because the archetype from which the manuscripts derive was a copy made several hundred years later than the Sasanian prototype. In the course of that time a certain number of mistakes had inevitably crept in.

The faulty nature of the transmission is evident from two omissions in the text of the Gāthās. In one poem a line is missing from one of the five-line stanzas (46. 15). In another, two stanzas have become conflated, with the loss of three and a half lines (53. 6). In other places we can infer from the metre that a word has been interpolated with the intention of clarifying the meaning. Sometimes the sense itself indicates or leads us to suspect that an error has occurred. In several passages it looks as if a word or a grammatical ending has been accidentally repeated from nearby, obliterating the true text. There is thus some scope for textual criticism and conjectural emendation. For those with a knowledge of Avestan I have provided at the end of the volume a list of variant or emended readings adopted for the purposes of the present translation.

Translating the Gāthās

The first challenge that faces any translator is that of understanding the meaning of the original. The Gāthās are notoriously difficult and problematic, and anyone who reckoned he had a sure understanding of every passage would be deluding himself. One has only to compare different modern versions with one another to see what a wide scope for disagreement there is among interpreters.

The difficulties are mainly lexical and syntactical. There are some words of whose meaning we have only an imprecise grasp, or no idea at all. There are many grammatical ambiguities, for example, whether a neuter noun ending in -ā is a singular in the instrumental case or a plural in the nominative or accusative, and whether a verb form is a past tense or timeless in its reference (the so-called injunctive). There are even places where it is disputed whether a word is a noun or a verb. Often enough it is doubtful which word is to be construed with which, or where the boundaries of phrases and sentences lie.

It is not that Zoroaster intended to be riddling. His original hearers, we may suppose, being familiar with his language and with the poetic traditions that he drew on, already initiated in his doctrines, and hearing the poems intelligently delivered, will have had few serious problems of comprehension. I disagree fundamentally with those modern scholars who claim that the prophet’s style is deliberately esoteric and encrypted, full of intentional double or multiple meanings. In my view, where different interpretations of a sentence are possible, it is the job of the translator or commentator to try to determine which one corresponds to the author’s intention. To credit him with deliberate ambiguity or multivalence is merely an excuse for indecisiveness, or for showing off the commentator’s resourcefulness.

In choosing between possible interpretations the best guide is contextual coherence. The translator must try to identify the essential thought underlying each sentence – what it is that Zoroaster is wanting to say and striving to express in metrical form – and to trace the sequence of his thinking from stanza to stanza. The more coherent the sequence of thought that can be elicited, while interpreting the words in as unforced a way as possible, the more likely it will be that we have reached a correct understanding.

In interpreting individual sentences the translator must try to cultivate a sense for natural word groupings and typical structural patterns, and a sense of the relationship between phrase and verse. He must also respect the order in which words and phrases are presented, which was, after all, the order in which Zoroaster’s hearers received them and mentally processed them. In my version I have so far as possible made each line of the English correspond to a line of the original, believing that this is the best way of conveying the structure of the prophet’s utterances. Here and there, for clarity, I have supplied in the English, in brackets, a word that is left implicit in the original.

The coherence that the translator believes he discerns will not always be immediately obvious to the reader. In order to make it clearer I have followed the example of Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin⁴⁹ and provided for each poem, facing the translation, a stanza-by-stanza paraphrase. This will at least show how I interpret the text in its main outlines.

In translating words that recur in different passages, especially those denoting specifically Zoroastrian concepts, a balance has to be struck between the ideal of consistency and the requirements of the individual context. With terms such as

and ārmati it is practicable to stick to ‘Right’ and ‘Piety’ throughout. But there are others which it is not feasible always to render by the same English word. For

, for instance, I have mostly used ‘dominion’, but there are places where ‘domain’, ‘realm’, ‘command’, ‘rule’, ‘reign’, ‘sway’, ‘power’, ‘control’, ‘domination’, or ‘authority’ seemed more appropriate. I have tried to avoid haphazardness on the one hand and mechanical equivalences on the other.

Finally it must be emphasized that any translation of the Gāthās necessarily has a provisional character. The translator does his best, but in the end he remains acutely aware of all the obscurities he has failed to clarify and all the alternative possibilities he has not definitively eliminated. I have often been struck by the truth of H. S. Nyberg’s dictum: ‘whoever has dealt with these texts has resigned himself to translate differently in the morning from what he did the night before’. Here and there, where a rendering is particularly open to question, I have indicated as much by setting the doubtful word or phrase in italics. But without writing a detailed commentary it is impossible to signal all the uncertainties to the reader, who is accordingly warned not to take everything too much on trust.

Introduction