SOURCE: “Scriptures and Doctrines” in Zoroastrianism: A Beleaguered Faith, Advent Books, 1983, pp. 13-49.

[In the following essay, Pangborn analyzes the development of Zoroastrianism from the qualified monotheism of Zoroaster's Gathas, through the ritual polytheism of the Later Avesta, to the controversy between the purist reform movement and the orthodoxy of modern Zoroastrianism.]

We have now identified the Zoroastrians and those composing their largest single—and, in recent times, modestly dispersed—community, the Parsis. Meanwhile, little has been said about the substance of the faith which, after all, enough people having embraced it, sets Zoroastrians apart as a distinctive religious community. This substance, composed initially of the beliefs and convictions of the prophet Zoroaster but also of both older and later ideas added by his followers, found expression in Scripture, the Avesta, the composite work that became for subsequent generations the principal source of their inspiration, renewal, and regulation. We will look for the moment at the theology which has evolved from it, together with doctrines of man and his destiny, leaving for later the ideas that inform the cultus and define morality.

ZOROASTER AND HIS GATHAS

The religion of Zoroaster before he sought its reformation was Indo-Iranian religion, a version of a body of religious beliefs that had been held by the large Indo-European multi-tribal community in general before various groupings within it migrated elsewhere—as to Iran—from the steppes of Asia. The early Vedic religion of those who went India-ward was a comparable modification of the older religion affected by a different experience. A significant central core of the older belief and practice, however, may be verified as having survived for a long time with but little change before Zoroaster undertook its criticism and revision in Iran.

Common to both Iranian and Indian versions of the earlier religion were numerous deities personifying the forces and vitalities of nature, their functions differing according to whether they were powers operating within the immediate environment and the human community or in the more distant reaches of the sky or cosmos. The name of a deity might change slightly and be different in Iran from what it was in India because of the evolution of languages, but many names remained the same. In any event, it is clear that it was customary in both traditions to classify the deities as either ahuras (the Vedic asuras) or daevas (the Vedic devas). Both classes apparently comprised deities benevolent and good as well as those malevolent and destructive.

How Zoroaster assayed that Weltanschauung (world view) is revealed in his Gathas. These are prayer-hymns he composed in poetic form to distill and enshrine, in language both memorable and memorizable, the record of his spiritual journey. Only five of them (comprised of 17 chapters in all) have survived, yet these suffice for reconstructing the main lines of his thought and the decisive events of his life.¹

His theology is shown to have developed from the way in which he treated the traditional dual classification of the deities. Of the ahuras, we hear of only one supreme deity worthy of worship, Ahura (Lord). He then linked with that title another one, Mazda (Wisdom), a word already familiar in Iran. There may have been precedent for this association, but we do not know for sure. In any case, whether he used one or the other alone, or the two together—sometimes in one order and sometimes in reverse—he meant that there is only one who is really the supremely good God, Ahura Mazda. It may seem curious that nowhere (in the Gathas we possess) did he deny the existence of other ahuras, but he mentioned none by name; and it was to one deity only that he ascribed all positive attributes, thus marking his system as perhaps a henotheism or, alternatively, a qualified monotheism.

His treatment of the daevas was likewise and uniquely his own. He saw them as the deities worshipped by the lawless, marauding nomads of the society. Their wills were one—to do evil. The semi-settled, pastoral tribesmen should worship deity only of the ahura type. If they then attended in any way at all to the daevas as well, they might not be honoring or adoring the daevas, but they were implying respect for their powers by entreating and placating them with sacrifices in order to ward off the evil they could do. The word of Zoroaster to one and all was that to pay either type of heed to the daevas was false religion. They were not true gods; they were the Evil Spirit (Angra Mainyu) and the hosts of evil who had sprung from his Evil Mind (Aka Manah). They were not to be honored, even by placation; they were to be fought, relentlessly, and all their evil intentions brought to naught.

The rest of Zoroaster's thought flows with reasonable consistency from these presuppositions. Ahura Mazda's Bounteous Spirit, Spenta Mainyu, is that aspect or “son” who is creative of life and the good in life. To say that this is God's Spirit is to affirm that his goodness or righteousness is his primary and all-encompassing attribute, with other qualities subsumed as further distinguishing traits. He is thus the eternal enemy of Angra Mainyu, the Evil Spirit. Whether, however, to regard Ahura Mazda and Spenta Mainyu as alternative terms for God or to think of Ahura Mazda as Spenta Mainyu's “creator” is a disputed question. Yasna 30:3 refers to two primordial “twin spirits,” one of which would be Ahura Mazda (Spenta Mainyu) and the other, Angra Mainyu. This would be ethical, theological dualism. Yasna 47:3, on the other hand, by referring to Ahura Mazda as the good spirit's father, has led to the idea that Ahura Mazda created both spirits and gave them freedom of choice, after which one chose good and the other, evil.²

Associated with God are the attributes (or other entities) which Zoroaster in some measure personified and referred to as Good Mind (Vohu Manah), Truth or Righteousness (Asha), Good Power or the Kingdom of God (Khshathra), Right-Mindedness or Devotion (Armaiti), Wholeness or Perfection (Haurvatat), and Immortality (Ameretat). By right aspiration and obedience, man may participate in or conform his life to the first four of these qualities of God. The last two, Perfection and Immortality, cannot be won by man; they are bestowed by God as gifts to those who seek the other qualities. These six, together with the Bounteous Spirit, have been called since early post-Gathic times the Bountiful Immortals (Amesha Spentas). We know that the names of some of them were already familiar. But opinion is divided as to Zoroaster's precise intention. He may have been declaring that some familiar ahuras were actually only abstract attributes of God without separate existence. Equally plausible is the possibility that he meant merely to subordinate old ahuras to God by saying he was their creator and adding moral dimension to their character.

The ambiguity exists probably because Zoroaster's theological interest was subordinated to his preoccupation with the existential reality of evil, its threat to the quality of life, and the inescapability of struggle if evil was to be overcome by good. His theology, in its positive aspects, went little further than to provide a divine source and authority for his vision of the good life. The reality of evil demanded that there be a correlative postulate of a transcendent ground for it as well. The ground is Angra Mainyu, the Evil Spirit, who together with his Evil Mind (Aka Manah) and ally in wickedness, the Lie (Druj) do all in their power to subvert the righteous works of Spenta Mainyu, Vohu Manah, and Asha. Zoroaster's scheme of opposites, however, stops essentially right there, its incompleteness strongly suggesting that evangelism for the good life was more important to him than theological tidiness.

The concern Zoroaster had for man was grounded on the importance he understood him as having in the divine plan. Of all the creatures God placed in the world that he created, man alone is made to be God's ally. Thus, like the twin spirits of the spiritual realm, he possesses free will. If he chooses rightly and accepts his divinely intended role, he will conform his mind to that of Vohu Manah and his will to Asha. His rewards will be the gifts of wholeness (Haurvatat: well-being, health) and immortality (Ameretat). Everything that is the opposite of such boons will be his if he responds to the promptings of the Evil Spirit and his hosts, and becomes a participant with them in the battle they are waging at every level of God's spiritual and earthly creation.

Another chapter explains the specific duties of all persons who choose the good. Suffice it to say here that if these duties are accepted and the war against evil is fought bravely, Zoroaster envisaged a world made perfect in a final consummation, a final judgment that will bring an end to time and an eternal resolution of the conflict between good and evil. Zoroaster and his loyal followers will be entrusted with the perfecting of the world. Ahura Mazda, through (or supported by) Truth (Asha), Good Mind (Vohu Manah), and Devotion (Armaiti), will preside over the final resolution and judge the souls of men. The test is one of passing through fire and molten metal. Good men will pass through unscathed and even be purified by the ordeal but evil men will be unmasked and unmercifully seared. The lot of the good men will be eternal felicity with Ahura Mazda in his Kingdom of Righteousness, but for evil men, irrevocable doom.

THE THEOLOGY OF THE LATER AVESTA

The Zoroastrianism of the Later Avesta is recognizable as having continuity with the Gathic picture of Zoroaster's reform. But there was change. Even if the substance of the religion was not so much altered as supplemented, this in itself wrought change in spirit or emphasis. The transition was effected in two stages.

The “Gatha of the Seven Chapters,” a composition in Gathic prose that post-dates Zoroaster and reflects a change of situation for his reforming religion, represents the first stage of the transition. Zoroaster's reform, even if finally successful in eastern Iran, did not immediately establish itself in the west. If it was to survive among the variations on Indo-Iranian religion in the provinces, its voice could not be Zoroaster's zealously exclusive one but had to be the more tolerant one of accommodation.

The “Gatha of the Seven Chapters” (Yasna Haptanghaiti: Yasnas 35-41) and Yasna 42 indicate that the adjustment was made. Ahura Mazda retained his primacy but in association with other lords (ahuras), known by name and enjoying a marked degree of autonomy. His own nature as pure spirit was materially diluted by speaking of his having the sun for his body. A new genre of feminine powers (gena) rated notice as the waters of earth. Old Iranian religion's fravashis, the pre-existent prototypal souls of all men born and to be born on earth, were mentioned for the first time since Zoroaster passed them over in silence. And the concreteness of Haoma was back. As a self-immolating god associated with sacrifice in the ancient cult, Haoma had been—and now was again—worshipped with intoxicating libations extracted from some plant and with the flesh of bulls or cows in ways which Zoroaster—without suppressing the cult altogether—had censured for profligacy. The teaching of Zoroaster was not forgotten, but much of the ancient religion he had so significantly reformed—in part, by ignoring it—was making a bid for re-affirmation.

The transition was completed by Zoroastrian athravans of the Achaemenid age. Their post-Gathic works, composing the so-called Later Avesta, tell us what they thought and practiced as “catholic Zoroastrianism.”³

The several Avestan sections are not altogether representative of the same tendencies, but they are not contradictory—nor of such diversity as to prevent our making an economical summary of their general direction. Thus, the Yasna (the incorporated Gathas excepted) consists of invocations and miscellaneous prayers containing long lists of deities to be honored and whose aid or blessing was sought. As the text for a ritual that was in many respects pre-Zoroastrian, it had for a main purpose “the continuance, strengthening, and purifying of the material world of the good creation …” and “its daily performance … [was] essential.”⁴ Clearly, the implication is that every creation of God has been given a sacred vitality or life of its own and that it ebbs away or can be destroyed by evil if it is not ritually renewed day by day. This is not the same thing as regarding all that God has created as simply good and deserving of care and respect from man. On the contrary, it is the sacralization of material goods; they participate in sacredness because the “life” they possess flows into them from the deities whose function is their care and protection. But whence comes that vitality or potency which the deities have to spare? The answer seems obvious: from the offerings man makes as part of the rituals conducted by the priests. It can hardly be an accident that the six Bountiful Immortals (excluding the Bounteous Spirit) have feast-days honoring them, nor that one of them, Immortality, is offered fruit; and another, Good Mind, as the patron of cattle, is offered milk. Thus we come full cycle, the lesser deities (or the angels—Yazatas—if preferred; it is the same) invest the entities of the material world with their own life or vitality so that offerings of them can in turn be made to the deities for the renewing of their powers. Then the deities can renew every day the vitalities they had shared with material things in the first place.

That the Yasna alone is sufficient evidence for characterizing the late Avestan theology as polytheistic is not really in much dispute among present-day scholars. What is at issue is whether the Later Avesta was as much of a departure from primitive Zoroastrianism as an earlier generation of scholars supposed, and thus, also, whether Zoroaster was less of an ethical monotheist—or dualist—than they presumed. Suffice it to say that, historically, when polytheistic and ritualistic tendencies are in the ascendency in a religion, the definition of goodness and righteousness as cultic punctiliousness and correctness has also prospered at the expense of their definition as moral character and ethical conduct. Now, what Zoroaster is known to have said in the Gathas that did survive shows far more concern for condemning the ritual practices of which he disapproved than for prescribing those he approved, and far more concern for moral character and ethical conduct than for righteousness defined as the correct performance of a plethora of detailed and complex rituals. Again and again, he enjoined certain attitudes—right aspiration, right commitment, and discriminating wisdom—and not the mechanics of ritual as the marks of both acceptable worship and the moral life. There is therefore considerable plausibility for the presumption—and here it is better to speak of tendencies than of fixed positions—that Zoroaster tended toward ethical monotheism—or dualism—and the Later Avesta toward a ritualistic polytheism, in which case as regards both direction and spirit the two differed significantly.⁵

The Visparad supplements the Yasna and only confirms its temper by lengthily “spinning out”⁶—as Geldner put it—the Yasna's liturgy for the six seasonal holidays (Gahambars) and their accompanying feasts. The Yashts, however, together with the Khordeh Avesta, dispel all doubt that the late Avestan religion differed from Zoroaster's, for there really seems no way of denying that the Avesta made his economy in theology a casualty of inflation. Unlike the Yasna where many divinities are addressed at once, the Yashts invoke them one at a time and capture our attention by the prominence they give to three ancient deities and to the fravashis.

Mithra, in the old Iranian religion, had been a junior, but essentially equal, partner of that ahura whom Zoroaster singled out as being light and truth and then exalted as the one Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda. But in the Gathas, he is not even mentioned. That is why attention is attracted by his reappearance in the Yashts as Ahura Mazda's creation or son, a deity upholding justice by insisting upon the sanctity of contract and treaty, and waging relentless war against all who invent lies or hold him in contempt. He was also understood as possessing the creating and preserving functions of the Bounteous Spirit (Spenta Mainyu), the theological consequence of which is the conflation of Ahura Mazda and his Bountiful Spirit (as in Yasna 30:3). Thus catholic Zoroastrianism supported the ethical dualism of opposing Angra Mainyu directly to Ahura Mazda.

The goddess Anahita was another familiar ahura of Indo-Iranian religion who, as “Lady of the Waters”—waters upon which the Iranian's dependence was measured by their scarcity—found her independent authority over water restored in the Yashts. She, too, received no mention in the Gathas of Zoroaster, the association of waters there having been with Wholeness (the Bountiful Immortal, Haurvatat) and thus with Ahura Mazda himself, whose gift they were as boon to man.

Verethraghna, as a god of war and victory, owed his recall from the limbo of Gathic silence to the place the Yashts give him as Mithra's agent in the war against violators of contracts and all enemies of the Good Mazdayasnian Religion in general. There is much that can be said about him, but it is enough for us to note that in being accommodated to Zoroastrianism, he was not shorn of the propensity for ruthlessness. His unhesitating destruction of enemies, which in the Yashts was made respectable, betokens a spirit at odds with that of Zoroaster, who sought first the conversion of his opponents and only after failing treated the unpersuaded as enemies and outcasts.⁷

Nothing in the Yashts having to do with the rehabilitation of some by-then half-starved gods, however, is as astounding as their recovery of functions that made even Ahura Mazda dependent upon them in the areas of their competence. The violence done to Zoroaster's theology was theoretically mitigated by crediting Ahura Mazda with the creation of the deities, but his divine supremacy was placed in jeopardy at the same time by the notion that in creating Mithra, in particular, he made him to be as worthy of veneration as he was himself. Ahura Mazda gave to him the task of protecting the whole material world as well as of vanquishing all daevic and human enemies. A house was built for him in heaven where even Ahura Mazda worships him. His portfolio bulged as he took on the assignments of protecting cattle, of granting men's pleas for sons, and of lighting the world by day after scourging the powers of evil through the night.⁸ Anahita was less successful in accruing prerogatives, but it was she whom Ahura Mazda needed to persuade Zoroaster that he should adopt and preach the Good Religion,⁹ and but for the fravashis, Ahura Mazda confessed that the human race could not have survived or his creation have been defended against its total domination by the Lie.¹⁰

This is perhaps as much as we need to say to understand the main tendencies of Zoroastrianism from its rise with the prophet to its “time of troubles” that began with Alexander's victory over Persia. The monotheistic direction of Zoroaster's theology was seriously compromised by a return to popularity for gods obscured if not banished by his reform. This accommodation was achieved by ascribing their creation to Ahura Mazda and calling them yazatas (angels of various ranks including the Bountiful Immortals as a highest echelon of archangels). But the yazatas, for all of that, were de facto deities—cherished values and functions divinized and personified (or, if it be preferred, re-divinized and re-personified).¹¹ And one may speak all one wants to of catholic Zoroastrianism's retention of the Wise Lord's primacy in its theology,¹² but it was an empty honor if Ahura Mazda had to ask the help of his own spiritual creatures, even as having only one's title left was degrading to those Bountiful Immortals who found lesser angels absorbing their functions and then, as ranking gods, gaining ascendancy over them.¹³ And yet, lest concern for theological tidiness be allowed to obscure the point and value of the changes wrought, it should be allowed that in all probability the willingness of Zoroaster's successors to try to be all things to all men may have saved the religion for posterity. It was a time, after all, not of reform-supporting Vishtaspas, but of Achaemenid kings whose interest in religion was in using it to justify their rule. A religion less eclectic and more capable of a critical stance toward both the social order and rival religious options might have marched straight into oblivion, taking both Zoroaster and his Gathas with it.

THE THEOLOGY OF THE SASANID AND POST-SASANID ERA

The task of re-collecting and collating the fragments of the Avesta not entirely forgotten between 330 b.c. and the Sasanid restoration of indigenous Persian rule in the 3rd century a.d. was difficult only in a logistical sense. The more difficult problem was the theological one of deciding (a) what the reconstituted Avesta meant, and (b) whether the Avestan theology was adequate or due for re-interpretation and revision in order to render it defensible in an age of more intellectual ferment.

The ferment was the result of Persia's association with other cultures during the course of its rise, fall, and domination by others. Because of success as well as exigency, Iranian thought became aware of Greek philosophies, Judaism, and Christianity, and of sects intending to improve upon one or another, or all, of these major traditions. It is tempting, because it was at least a disputatious if not an exciting intellectual age, to describe and analyze these currents of thought in detail. But the temptation must be resisted, principally because our concern is with what went into the making of contemporary Zoroastrianism and not with what was discarded or fought off along the way. Manichaeanism and the Mazdakite heresy, as noted earlier, languished in Persia or died out completely after their leaders were martyred, the former surviving mainly as a threat to Christian orthodoxy in lands to the west. Zurvanism, a movement that attempted to counter theological dualism by making Zurvan, as Infinite Time, the father of both Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, failed so completely that the Pahlavi tracts could be written without making a single direct reference to the controversies Zurvanism had generated.

The religion then, that emerged as the result of the literary and theological efforts of an age extending from the 3rd through the 9th century a.d. (and probably into the 11th) had these several features:

1. The language in which it was couched was Pahlavi, a name for a dialect of Middle Persian that Zoroastrians used and that is therefore sometimes called Zoroastrian Middle Persian. The remnants of the Avesta as gathered together during the reigns of Sasanian kings were in the Gathic and Avestan dialects. The Pahlavi writers translated all of this material into their language, with the exception of some of the Yashts, and wrote their own tracts in which they described the content of much of the Avesta for which they had no remembered text. They also preserved in this way an enormous amount of myth and legend that had become the popular form of the religion of the pious and beleaguered faithful.

Names and terms employed during this period remained the same in the rituals because their texts were almost entirely from the Avesta. But in the tracts recounting and interpreting the history and theology of the tradition, the Pahlavi words were sufficiently different in many instances that confusion may be avoided if the more important ones are cited. Thus, Ohrmazd = Ahura Mazda, Spena Menu = Spenta Mainyu, Ahriman = Angra Mainyu, Amahraspands = Amesha Spentas, Yazads = Yazatas, and Zaratusht = Zarathushtra (Zoroaster).

2. The formal and finally dominant theological dualism was a reformed version of catholic Zoroastrianism. The old Iranian gods rehabilitated in the Later Avesta were again forced into retreat and regarded at most as spirits subservient to God. However, the coalescence of God and his Bounteous Spirit, implied in catholic Zoroastrianism, was reaffirmed, so that Ahriman remained directly opposed to Ohrmazd.¹⁴ Neither of the two was without the trait of finitude, but the dualism was made at least provisional rather than permanent by believing in God's final triumph and Ahriman's defeat. The Yazads, including the Amahraspands (Bountiful Immortals), were given back functions they had lost to rival deities, but allowed a status no higher than that of created and subordinate angels.

This is not to say that exponents of a more monotheistic doctrine of God as the only creator—even of Ahriman—did not attempt to hold out against the dualists, but the Pahlavi tracts, by not even mentioning the minority position, make it clear that dualism became orthodoxy.

3. The dualistic dogma of the theologians, however, was not bread for the lay remnant of believers in Muslim Persia. Their sustenance was myth and legend, and this too, the Pahlavi tractarians were willing to preserve and magnify. Reference has been made earlier to old Indo-Iranian and Persian notions about the origins of the world and the prehistorical eras linking beginnings to the known and literate era of the Median and Persian empires. The Avesta refers, although but briefly, to these in passages of the legal section, the Videvdat, and also initiates the process of idealizing Zoroaster that ends in idolizing him. For the Later Avesta, he had been the first ideal man, the first to master God's law, and the one man on earth worthy—after his death—of homage in the form of prayers and sacrifices. But this was only the beginning. There are no religions that have not at some stage in their history mythologized one or more of their founders and prophets by identifying them primarily with a divine hierarchy, and by giving them the role of revealing to men the nature of the divine realm and how they may relate to it. Zoroastrianism is no exception. Fancy had had free play for five pre-Sasanid centuries when the task of preserving the religion had subordinated theological creativity. And the Pahlavi tractarians were as ready to pay court to these proliferating myths and legends in the corpus of the faith as they were to justify the religion with their dualistic theology.¹⁵

There were three principal subjects upon which such imaginative thought expanded. The first was Zoroaster himself. His birth was foreordained, his conception miraculous and his delivery attended by archangels. Throughout his childhood and until he won final acceptance for his religion at Vishtaspa's court, repeated threats were made upon his life by demons and wicked men, but from all of these he was miraculously rescued.

A second subject upon which imagination played was the “cast” of the spiritual realm. On Ohrmazd's side, the Bounteous Immortals were valued less for their representation of abstract virtues than for their guardianship of six parts of creation.¹⁶ We learn that each of them, as well as Ohrmazd, had three Yazads (Av. Yazatas—angels) as aides, some of whom—e.g., Mihr (Av. Mithra), Srosh (Av. Sraosha), and Rashn (Av. Rashnu)—had ranked as deities in the Later Avesta. Many were now named who before had been nameless—which did not in any way diminish the ranks of the un-named! Functions also changed in many instances and care for the living and their welfare in this world gave ground to concern that the faithful might fare well in the next world. The Frawahrs (Av. fravashis) were also re-conceived. Quantitatively, they were diminished in number, since only earthly creatures—and not every heavenly being as well, including even Ohrmazd, as in the Later Avesta—were thought to have such prototypal souls. But more obvious was an inconsistency that emerged in thinking about their nature. As some of the earliest creations of Ohrmazd, the Frawahrs were throught to descend to earth, each to become the soul of a new-born person. At death, the soul of the good and faithful man would return to its earlier heavenly abode, but descend for every feast day commemorated to the dead, to bless the living who honored it properly or to curse irrevocably those who did not. It is this conflation of the Frawahr and soul that introduced confusion. For dualistic orthodoxy, God's creations were good by nature, and it was not difficult to conflate the Frawahr with the soul of the person choosing to be good. But what of the case of the good Frawahr finding itself the soul of the person choosing evil? The conflation was then impossible, and the Frawahrs of evil men only could be considered, quite inconsistently, as “doubles” who leave their counterpart souls at the Bridge of Judgment and re-ascend to their appointed stations in the heavenly realm, while the evil souls go to hell until the final judgment and resurrection at the end of earthly time. In short, the confusion in the Pahlavi tracts consists in suggesting that the Frawahr and soul of a sinner are alike in essence but separable in nature, whereas the Frawahr of a good person becomes conceptually conflated with his soul. The consequence is that on feast days when an ancestor's presence and blessing are sought, only the Frawahr of a sinful ancestor can answer the call, but what is invoked in the case of a good ancestor can be either his Frawahr or his soul in the thought that they are one and the same anyway.¹⁷

So much for dualism's account of Ohrmazd's good spiritual creations. The other half of the story treats Ahriman and his evil ones. It is a half which has two parts. One deals with Ahriman's spiritual allies. Here again, we find the cast of characters imaginatively inflated. And—since reason is not a primary tool of theological construction when its task is preempted by fancy—the role pattern is far from tidy. The principal feature of the pattern, however, is that for every one of Ohrmazd's spiritual creatures, Ahriman conjured up an opposing demon of equivalent rank and power, each having its own mini-demons as aides and all of them together charged with tempting man to embrace every vice for which there could possibly be an opposing virtue.

The half of the myth that is Ahriman's story has as its other part what he did (and does) to God's world. He is described as not content to oppose and corrupt God's work, as in the Gathas, but as having balanced every good creation of God with an evil one of his own. Much of this is presaged in the Later Avesta (in both the Yashts and the Videvdat), but the Pahlavi literature was even more starkly dualistic; there, every difficulty met by man in the natural order—whether radical threat or mere inconvenience—owes its ontological existence to Ahriman. Thus, as just one example, the darkness which God gave to man as his time for sleep and renewal, but which could be misused by wrongdoers as cover for theft or murder, was transferred from the good to the evil order and understood to be evil not by its corruption in use but in it svery nature. Dualism, then, was not only one pair of ontological opposites—Ohrmazd vs Ahriman—but many: light vs darkness, truth vs false-hood, Zoroastrians who wear the identifying shirt and girdle vs those who do not, ritual purity vs pollution, life vs death, health vs disease, good creatures vs noxious creatures, life vs smoke, rain vs drought, summer vs winter, south vs north, and of course heaven vs hell.

The third subject upon which the imagination played in the Pahlavi period was the destiny of man and the eschatological future, including the epochs during which saviors appear, a final universal judgment, the glorious renovation of creation, and the nature of Best Existence (Paradise, for which the Pahlavi term was Vahishta Ahu). With this subject, as with that of the beginnings of things, soaring fancies did not encounter limits, for they dealt with drama directed from and ultimately played out on the stage of the spiritual realm, and there, where the mundane and limiting realities of this world did not apply, anything was possible. The Pahlavi tracts show that full advantage was taken of the freedom to speculate in an age when defensive Zoroastrians found tasteless sustenance in reason and restraint, because they needed, as compensation for earthly trials, the sweeter viands of their visionary paradise to come.

There could hardly have been a question asked for which imagination did not conjure up a detailed and specific answer. The reader intrigued by the curios of a credulous age can examine them for himself,¹⁸ but the concrete materialization of the spiritual realm that was involved cannot be entirely passed over on that account. The exact location of the Bridge of Judgment was cited. The anxieties of the soul of a deceased person during the three days that pass before the Bridge is reached were described. Angels ready at the Bridge to judge and then to condemn or aid were identified and named. The exact weight of good deeds as compared with that of evil deeds, which decided whether the soul's destiny was heaven or hell, was exactly determined; for those whose deeds were in exact balance, there was an intermediate place (Hamistagan) where the souls would wait without undue suffering until the day of resurrection. Hell (Achishta Anghu), it was averred, lay deep within the earth below the Bridge. The soul consigned to it went to one of four levels according to the amount of torture his degree of wickedness deserved, and the punishment was made to fit the crime. Heaven too had its four levels, and while each accorded its own degree of felicity, no soul's station afforded less bliss than that enjoyed by angels; and ambrosia, the angels' own food, was the food of all.

A rough sketch of the “choreography” for all this fateful dance of souls had been provided in the Later Avesta, especially by the Yashts and the Videvdat. The outline for the last Judgment and subsequent Renovation was there as well. The Pahlavists only filled it in by defining times, locating places, identifying old and many new members of the production crew, naming names, and describing the process by which evil souls as well as good ones would finally be gathered into God's perfected and everlasting Kingdom.

Zoroaster had spoken of himself and his followers—whether present or future is uncertain—as the saviors (saoshyants) who were God's agents in helping men make ready for a final consummation. The Later Avesta had named three successive saviors, only the last one of whom was cited as a direct descendant of Zoroaster and given Saoshyant as a name. It was he who would be born, in the “supernatural manner” of a “superman”, to a “virgin” immaculately impregnated by seed of Zoroaster that had been preserved and “watched over by ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine Fravashis.”¹⁹

Finally, there is the scenario elaborated by the Pahlavists, especially in the Denkard and the Bundahishn tracts. All three soshyos (Av. saoshyants), of whom the last is named Soshyo (or Soshyans) are to be immaculately conceived by virgins at intervals of a thousand years, to combat the evils of their respective periods and to move the good creation nearer to perfection than they found it. During each successive millennium, evil will lose some of its power and dominion until, finally, during a 57-year period of Soshyans' activity, perfection itself will be achieved—one token of which will be that men then living will need no material food, yet be vitally alive.²⁰

The end will be near when all the dead are resurrected, given new material bodies, and re-judged in exact conformity with the judgments rendered when they died. A few persons will have been so evil that they crossed over into the demons' camp and will perish with them. Otherwise, the resurrected dead will join the then-living in passing through a flood of molten metal. This will be felt as an agonizing ordeal only by the wicked among the dead, but they have purgation of their sins and release from hell as compensation.

The seared world can now be renovated and made the eternal habitation for mankind. Families will be reunited, but there will no longer be birth or death. Those who died as adults will possess the vitalities of the age of 40, while whose who died as youths will remain as though they are but 15.²¹ With the earth thus repopulated, the time will have come for a final confrontation with Ahriman. All his creations except darkness will be destroyed. He alone will survive in his own darkness, forever impotent, completely dissociated from the Kingdom of Ohrmazd. The world that Ahriman can no longer touch is Paradise, and all mankind will live by the spirit, needing neither material food nor drink.²²

It would seem that the vision of last things grew the brighter as the light of theology faded. Texts dating from the 10th through the 14th centuries reveal the confusion engendered by a sectarianism that dualism did not wholly obliterate. But for the most part, they treat of ritual traditions and, like the later Rivayats that answered questions posed by the Parsis, say little about theology and then only by implication. One of Dhalla's sub-headings is apt: “Almost every vestige of Iranian scholarship perishes.”²³ The case might be put differently. The more theological dualism was gilded with legend and myth, the more decisively the locus of the struggle between good and evil was shifted from the hearts and wills of men to an external arena where the antagonists were angelic and demonic forces and men were only partisans of the opposing teams. Religion, morally speaking, had become a spectator sport. Or, returning to Dhalla for an analogy, “The sacred fire, kindled by the holy prophet in the remote past, was still there, … [but] only smouldering in ashes upon the altar.”²⁴

THEOLOGY TODAY

The task of making sense of, and explaining to others, the structure and content of contemporary Zoroastrian theology is at once both difficult and easy. Difficult, because—unlike history which has after all happened and can be sifted again and again by its students until some measure of agreement can be reached as regards its essential lineaments—the present is the age of the living who take sides and whose thinking is or may be changing as the result of confrontations between parties (internal stimuli) or of either the desire or the necessity to come to terms with society, itself a changing thing (external forces). No analyst can ever be confident, therefore, that he has read aright all of his data, impressions, and suppositions, for all the parts that make up the picture his analysis is constructing may be shifting in place and importance as he works. Much less, we might add, can the analyst be sure that he is excluding his own bias from his understanding and interpretation. For the wish to enforce custom or to effect change is hard to nullify when dealing with the malleable present—and more difficult to detect than historical revisionism.

Nonetheless, the task may also be easy, or at least—because the subject is Zoroastrianism—reasonably manageable. For while, as Boyce remarks, “the present position of Zoroastrianism is complex”, as a religion it “is characterized by immense conservatism,” so that “essentially and in details … the later religion is unchanged from that of ancient Iran.”²⁵ Moulton, were he still living to follow up his first (and only) on-site study of Zoroastrianism, would surely have to add a fervent Amen. He would say, at the least, that essentially and in most details the religion has not changed since he studied it 60 years ago.²⁶

We may start by appropriating Boyce's typology for assaying the theological spectrum, and hope that it will also be useful when we come to every other topic treated by subsequent chapters. She notes first—and not without reason, as we shall see—the orthodox group, together with those of Ilm-e-Khshnoom whose esoteric sectarian views are designed somewhat curiously to defend orthodoxy rather than challenge it. The second major group represents the reform movement. Besides these, there are the “nominal believers” whose beliefs are vague and imprecise but still inclusive of the notion that a few principal rites are efficacious in gaining the divine favor; and “finally, agnostics and atheists” who retain their Zoroastrian connection by blood if not religion and are given by their prior wish or permission, or their families', the last rites when they die.²⁷ Obviously, neither nominal believers nor non-believers have anything to contribute to theological discussion even if by their presence and numbers they represent factors of great importance for the religion as a whole, especially as regards its present disposition and its potential for survival. This leaves the othodox and reform positions as the only ones to consider, vis-a-vis theology—though there are differences within each group which make it impossible to describe either one as neatly uniform.

Unfortunately, all too little clarity is gained by finding that there are only two groups, with or without sub-groups, whose views are at issue. The reason is that neither Zoroastrians in general nor the Parsis in particular have concerned themselves enough with theology per se to make the theological vocation attractive and compelling to the best minds of any recent generation. As both Moulton and Boyce have observed, although half a century apart, the community makes almost no provision for religious instruction or the systematic teaching of doctrine. Moulton, for his part, lamented that a deficiency in “the critical faculty” made the imminent appearance of theological genius quite unlikely, while Boyce points to the concern with “the practice of religion” as, by implication, so preoccupying that theology is inevitably given short shrift.²⁸ One way of saying this is that ritual practice—i.e., the cultus (Boyce's “practice of religion”)—defines theology, and that it is not the other way around. But the cultus of Zoroastrianism is a composite construction from the early periods in the religion's development, the parts and rationales of which have never been made consistent and coherent by the ordering principles of a single theology. The theological enterprise is never, therefore, given a position of priority, but is used to explain or justify now-this, now-that ritual practice or its reform according to whichever of several hoary ideals the particular apologist chooses as his norm. The results for theology are chiefly obscurantism, contradictions, and a babble of tongues. But enough of reasons (or excuses) for postponing the attempt to say what is believed, however problematical that belief may prove to be.

As a preliminary remark, it may be said that most contemporary exponents of the tradition, whether orthodox or reformist, are in greater or lesser measure reverting to the Avesta and its two languages, Gathic and Avestan, for their vocabulary of essential religious terms, and allowing the Pahlavi (Middle Persian) forms to fall gradually into disuse. There are at least two reasons for this. One is that, after all, the texts for the entire cultus are in the languages of the Avesta, the only exceptions being some short and supplementary benedictory prayers in Pazand, a post-Pahlavi dialect, and, similarly, the “sermonic” portions of such ceremonies as weddings. Surely it makes sense, if all the technical terms for theological discourse are drawn from languages already “dead” anyway, that economy should be effected by choosing the forms found in the languages they actually use for their treasured rituals. A second reason for this trend is more theological because it is related to a trend in theology per se. This is the trend that consists of looking backward to the original deposit of prophetic revelation and early development of the religion for “a pristine purity” not compromised or sullied by later accretions of inferior doctrine or by tendencies to re-mythologize the religion. Again, there is sense—if the most defensible foundations of the faith are, indeed, to be found in the earliest traditions—in supposing that they may be expounded more understandably if the technical terms used in their original expression are not exchanged for later and no less archaic derivations. Behind both of these reasons may be noted also the need felt by both orthodoxy and reform to counter with persuasive argument the criticism of non-Zoroastrian monotheists.

That having been said, however, the case seems to be that the reformers are the more purist than the orthodox in their effort to ground the religion in its “primitive truths.” That is to say, reform is willing to prune away not only the imaginative excesses of the Pahlavi age but to question any portion of the Later Avesta found at odds with what Zoroaster said in his Gathas. Orthodoxy refuses to go that far because of all things that might be given up, the traditional cultus is not one of them. And since the Later Avesta provides most of the material for the liturgical texts as well as theological mandates for the rituals, the orthodox are perforce required to invest a great effort in interpretation of the Later Avesta in order to answer criticism from within and without. Then if the interpretation itself remains unconvincing, all that is left—for to concede more is unthinkable—is to fall back on tangential arguments for which they assume an a priori validity.

One such argument—already alluded to in the Introduction—is that age is a criterion for determining the truth-value of doctrine. Reform has its own scattered exponents of this notion, but in returning to primitive Zoroastrianism, the majority is content to accept for Zoroaster the approximate dates suggested by historians uninterested in theological apologetics. If they employ the argument of age at all, it is the age of Zoroaster and not the Later Avesta that concerns them, and any of the 2nd or early 1st millennium suggestions is an early enough date to have such truth-value as age is alleged to guarantee. Orthodoxy, however, seems more united in its position, that of being determined to identify the age of Zoroaster as that of about 8,000 years ago. Some of its polemicists go further, asserting that authentic “Mazdayasnism—Mazda-worshipping religion—began several thousands of years before Zarathushtra.” Thus there was truth before his time, and his mission was not that of a founder of a new religion or a reformer of age-old error, but one of restoring “pristine purity” to Mazdayasni religion by ridding it of “the evil of devayasni. …”²⁹ Another apologist is even more precise in his dating. “As per my humble research,” he writes, “our revered Prophet was born on [the day of] Roz Hormazd, Mah Fravardin … 6,325 years before Christ, most probably at dawn.” For him, the idea that there had been an earlier age of pure theological truth is reinforced by noting that science as well, “the art of the Magi Priests, had reached its zenith: [for in those days] people could fly in the air … [and] fire could be summoned to our kitchen as and when desired (electric installation), etc.” The Golden Age, however, deteriorated because “the Scientists of those hoary days” were able to put their knowledge to evil use as well as good. They “could stop the rains at any time; destroy a whole city in minutes (atomic explosion), and so on.” Together with “continuous wars and rumours of war and murder …” the evils of the age required the advent of Zoroaster if ancient truth was to be proclaimed afresh and men's feet turned once more toward the path of righteousness.³⁰ This is clearly a rare instance of unfettered imagination, as is also, probably, the case of the reformist priest who is convinced that Zoroaster was predestined to be born on New Year's Day as a sign of the cosmic significance of his advent.

Such doubtful claims aside, the ardency with which all parties maintain their positions goes far to explain why the task of reducing orthodox theology to clear and succinct statement has its difficulties. Consider, as example, the orthodox objective of retaining all that can be by some means retained. This is not the organizing principle that would be provided by, say, the ideals of rational coherence and a more rigorously scientific historicity. It should occasion no surprise, therefore, if students of the religion find an obscurantism, however unintended, that permits of different understandings of what they read or are told. The opinion of Boyce, for example, is that the orthodox perpetuate the theological dualism of the Later Avesta and the Pahlavi tracts, according to which Angra Mainyu has his own independent existence.³¹ But Dhalla who, given his strictures against traditionalism, can hardly be rated an orthodox apologist was clearly of different mind, when he wrote in the 1930s that “we hardly ever find even at this day any learned Parsi priest or layman marshalling arguments in vindication of the [theologically dualistic] doctrine.”³² (emphasis added.)

The contemporary work, Zoroastrianism,³³ written by Masani for English speaking non-Parsi readers, illustrates the problem one has in deciding what is thought by the orthodox who, so far, have retained their control of the institutions of their religion. It is Masani's contention that the religion is a monotheism because there is no spirit opposing Ahura Mazda that equals him in power. To be sure, there is evil in the world, but it is a principle not devised by Ahura Mazda; and thus to speak of Angra Mainyu as a spiritual being is merely metaphor. Yet Spenta Mainyu's existence as God's created and subordinate good Spirit is affirmed, along with the view that the Gathas say evil is opposed directly to Spenta Mainyu rather than Ahura Mazda. Thus when Masani needs to prove that Ahura Mazda is untainted by any connection with or responsibility for evil, he posits an independent (but otherwise unspecified) origin for evil as a principle. But when he wishes to establish Ahura Mazda's supremacy as proof that the religion is a monotheism in its theology, he appeals to Zoroaster, alleging that for him Angra Mainyu was the rebellious one of Ahura Mazda's Twin Spirits. There is also an unresolved discrepancy in Masani's explanations of the divine hierarchy. When he stresses the unity of God, he treats the Amesha Spentas and the Yazatas as his attributes, but when his purpose is to deny that there is worship of material fire and water, he says that only the spirits in such elements are worshipped.³⁴

Current tracts published by orthodox authors for circulation among Parsis, and notes taken on interviews with orthodox priests, indicate that Masani has represented orthodoxy with reasonable fidelity. There is no budging from the claim that the religion is a monotheism, but beyond that—in accounting for evil and in defining Ahura Mazda's spiritual “creations”—there are no positions that all the orthodox accept. Nor does any one theorist seem to take a single internally consistent position. Thus Dabu has written that Angra Mainyu is “one of the twins created by God,” “the destructive and ephemeral principle of Cosmos,” “the destroyer … [who] is not in revolt against God, but does unpleasant work assigned to him,” the divinely appointed “agent … [who] is permitted to deceive and test all souls … causing death and destruction of form, until the world is ripe for immortality. …”³⁵ Satan would appear here to be the subverter of the “spirit and matter, Life and Form” that are the results of God's self-manifestation, yet Dabu says also that “wickedness is due to that part in man which we have derived during the evolutionary process from our material nature, and the body with an animal ancestry.”³⁶ The difficulties are obvious. If life and form are divine manifestations, then material nature should not be, itself, the source of evil. But if having a material nature is the reason for men's wickedness, then is Satan needed as an agent? And if Satan is doing work that God has assigned to him, how do we reconcile that, on the one hand, with the idea that God is in no way responsible for evil, and on the other hand, with the notion that an agent attempting to thwart God's will is nevertheless not really God's adversary?

The two principal views among the orthodox about the Amesha Spentas are that they are attributes (aspects) of God or his creations with independent assigned functions, but there is little concern to decide the matter one way or the other. There is more evident certainty, however, that the Yazatas (angels) at the next lower level of the spiritual hierarchy are individual spiritual entities who hear and respond to the prayers addressed to them. The reason for the greater certainty on this issue is not readily perceived. Perhaps it is because the principal prayers of the liturgies are addressed to the Yazatas and the one thing on which orthodoxy is unified is that the traditional rituals must be preserved unchanged in order to be efficacious. In any case, the orthodox are driven on that account alone to regard the liturgical portions of the Later Avesta as having a scriptural authority equal to that of the Gathas. They do not, however, pay heed to the Pahlavists' imaginative multiplication of the angelic and demonic personnel of the spiritual realm. With respect also to doctrines about life after death and eschatology, views are determined by the Avestan texts rather than the Pahlavi tracts. Therefore, the only divinities associated with death and affirmed in doctrine are four Yazatas that figure prominently in the funeral liturgies, and while it is possible to find an occasional believer in the Pahlavists' positive identification and dating of the epochal saviors, the tendency is away from literalism. The “sons” of Zoroaster, says Dabu, can be taken “in an allegorical sense” as “more great messengers from God” for whom there is need “from time to time”; and as for the end time, it “must be far away,” for “the universe does not progress with leaps and bounds … [but only by] slow natural evolution … to bring about the destined Utopia.”³⁷

The one group among the orthodox possessing a unique and unifying ideology for defending traditionalism and its core of ritualism is a sect called Ilm-e-Khshnoom. Its lineage is not easily traced, but it appears to represent an effort to free Zoroastrianism from explicit alliance with late 19th century Theosophy by providing the religion with its own body of occult wisdom and esoteric interpretation of history and doctrine. Its interests resemble those also of an occult ascetic mysticism known to have attracted some Persian Zoroastrians in the post-Pahlavi era who were very probably influenced by Muslim mystics. Evidence is lacking, however, for direct descendancy on the part of Ilm-e-Khshnoom from this strain of mysticism, either doctrinally or institutionally.

The sect has virtually no structure of organization, but is constituted of the few priests and laymen who are willing to devote time to writing and to leading and attending discussion group meetings. The “master” to whose teaching these contemporary sectarians look for their Khshnoom (Enlightenment) was the late Behramshah Naoroji Shroff of Surat in Gujarat. He is alleged to have been taught the real truths of the religion during the 1870's in an Iranian mountain fastness where “Master-souls” and their followers had hid from the Muslim conquerors of the 7th century. There, from the chief master, he learned about the evolution of the cosmos, the temporal duration of which is supposed to span four great eons divided into 64 eras, each of 81,000 years; about Zoroaster's having known the truth because of his atunement to the music of the heavenly spheres and of how his followers had to translate his divine songs into earthly human language if ordinary people were to understand them; and how the preservers of the ancient lore are protected from unwanted discovery by an invisible talismanic barrier of miraculously repelling power.

Shroff is supposed to have remained in Iran only three and a half years (or until about 1880), when he returned to India to lead an exemplary Parsi life apparently conventional in all respects except one—he had been given a miraculous liquid that enabled him to turn copper into gold as insurance against having to pursue any occupation other than that of the savant. Yet he remained uncommunicative until about 1910 when he is said to have overcome a reluctance to share with others the secrets in his possession.³⁸

A major objective of the sect is the reinterpretation of the rituals. Every artifact and action has a deeper hidden meaning than any provided by exoteric explanation. It is not enough to say that the consecrated urine of a pure white bull owes its current usage in purification rites to the fact that the urine of the cow “was believed by the ancient Zoroastrians to possess disinfecting properties,”³⁹ that feeding the temple fires with sandalwood stems from ancient regard for aromatic substances as symbols of divine power,⁴⁰ or that the sacred shirt (sudreh) worn by the initiated Zoroastrian has in addition to meanings for its separate parts the general value of being “a symbol that reminds one of purity of life and righteousness.”⁴¹ On the contrary, according to occult interpretation, “the liquid passed by cows and bulls alone possesses the special purifying property because the ‘plexus,’ the receptive centre (of magnetic current) operating on the urinary organs of cows and bulls is under the influence of Jupiter.” Unconsecrated, the urine “remains pure for 72 hours from the time it is passed.” But as Nirang—that is, as urine consecrated “through the elaborate holy ceremony of ‘Nirang-din,’ [it] does not turn putrid for several years …” and so has the power when administered to the body every morning to counteract the “invisible microbes” that, in one's sleep, “envelop the human body and impair the Khoreh (aura).”⁴² Similarly, the sandalwood becomes more than an analogical or metaphorical symbol. According to Chiniwalla, the greater the quantity of sandalwood that is burned, the greater the “manthric” activity of the fire upon which the very existence of our “Eternal and Temporary Universes” depends.⁴³ As for the sudreh, it shares with a girdle (kusti) in possessing “certain talismanic qualities which act … as a magical protective mechanism in times of crisis.⁴⁴

The ultimate authority for this body of wisdom rests upon the knowledge that Zoroaster himself possessed it, for he was not a mortal man but an angel—the deputy of the Yazad, Sraosha—“sent to this world endowed with great powers and … the knowledge of all ages.”⁴⁵ Moreover, it is maintained that all of Zoroaster's revelations as translated into human language were saved and hidden in a talismanically-protected place. Hence there is a whole Avesta which only the “Master-souls” have known in its entirety and which serves as the source for corrections and additions to the fragmentary remnants known by the uninitiated majority of Zoroastrians.

A principal objective that such speculation serves is, as already stated, the defense of the whole cultus in as traditional and unmodified a form as possible. If every rite, and every liturgical text for every rite, are vehicles for invisible powers that illuminate, heal, protect from harm, and eventually transform mortality into immortality, then tampering with any part of the cultus is obviously unthinkable. Thus the sect serves to reinforce the orthodox theology of a pluralistic spiritual hierarchy as found in the liturgical texts from the Avesta. Beyond that, however, the sect embraces a doctrine of radical spirit-vs-matter dualism which the mainstream tradition has always subordinated and given only minor place in the total doctrinal system. That is to say, it is true that the Videvdat discloses an ancient revulsion toward some aspects of the material world—such as dead and decaying bodies, or creatures that poison or threaten in some way other material creations useful to man—and that much of this revulsion has not been dissipated even in a scientifically more sophisticated age. But the doctrine is that if matter is “noxious,” it has been made so by corrupters either demonic or human. Evil is therefore the consequence of devotion to lies and of actions that are immoral. But matter, in essence, is held to be the good creation of God whose intentions for it in the divine scheme of things were wholly wise and pure. Correlatively, the remedy for its corruption in the eschatological future is the world's renovation—its renewal or return to an originally perfect state.

The praise reserved for the purely spiritual and the disparagement of any material embodiment reflect a sectarian doctrinal position metaphysically irreconcilable with that of the orthodox majority, however complete the agreement that exists on retention of the traditional cultus. Several of the sect's propositions make the distinction clear. Behind and above everything is “Ahu, the Absolute One in Oneness, the Supreme Deity over Ohrmazd and Ahriman.”⁴⁶ From this One, a spiritual cosmos emanated, with various levels of spirituality for spiritual beings of different grades. Souls deficient in divine knowledge are relegated from the 8th and lowest heaven to the material planetary realm where the more recalcitrant of them become embodied according to “the law of Infoldment of Spirit into Matter …, [and] go through the rounds of birth and death … till Emancipation is gained … [by the reverse process of] Unfoldment of Spirit from Matter. … ⁴⁷ We hear of enlightenment for those who become adept in their responsiveness to spiritual vibrations, of pure matter being only fiery essence as contrasted with the concrete gross matter of our empirical experience, of immortality rather than resurrection or renewal, and the reunion of our “Divine Sparks” with the ‘Divine Flame.” This is none other than a philosophically monistic resolution of a dualism that is regarded as only apparent or provisional. When the process of manifestation, emanation, descent (of spirit into matter) ceases, then the reverse process of re-absorption begins. Its philosophical affinity is with Hindu Vedanta, but its fascination with mysteries makes it nearer kin to ancient astrological lore, Gnosticism, Jewish Cabala, and Theosophy.

There is little way of measuring the influence of occult doctrines such as those propounded by Ilm-e-Khshnoom. Many random impressions coalesce, however, to suggest that very few Parsis are theologically affected.⁴⁸ Nor are the few themselves particularly influential. If they are given a hearing by others, the reason is not credibility of doctrine but appreciation on the part of the orthodox for support of cultic traditionalism.

Any other sectarian divisions among Zoroastrians are based upon different calendars and comment upon them may be left to the chapter on the cultus. If there is any correlation between the calendar issue and metaphysics or theology, it is provided more by coincidence than design. That is to say, the same Parsis who believe in accommodating the ecclesiastical calendar to a contemporary secular one are likely to be reformers by temperament and thus ready to discuss new trends of thought in any area of religious thought.

As for reformers in general, they constitute a movement and are not identified as a sect. The priests among them are few, largely because most priests have an understandably vested interest in preserving the social and professional prerogatives which traditionalism underwrites. The reformers are therefore mainly laymen divided—how unevenly no one knows—between those who are aggressive and articulate and those who, finding that reformist agitation arouses only discussion but not change, settle for perfunctory observance of a few obligations that sustain their nominal membership in the Parsi community.

We have already noted that systematic theology is not a major interest of Parsis, but that they attend to it if and when they feel the need of disavowing polytheism. In this respect, reformers and most of the orthodox are similar, as they are also in making essentially non-theological issues their principal concerns. But when they do undertake to “do theology,” they differ in that the reformers are the more radical of the two parties in their reductionism. The orthodox, professing monotheism, are prepared to repudiate the theological dualism and mythopoeic excesses of Sasanian orthodoxy, but they have trouble—as we have seen—in handling the theological implications of the Later Avesta because it provides the liturgies for a sacrosanct cultus. There are some who do re-interpret the divinities to whom prayers are addressed, by denying the need to be literal and saying that the divinities merely symbolize the attributes and powers of one God. But for many, the lack of training in theology makes a venture into speculative thinking too hazardous to contemplate. The result is a re-affirmation of the literal existence of the divinities combined with insistence that their monotheism is not thereby qualified because one God created them and made them his subordinates.

The reformers are more reductionist because they are ready to reform the cultus and on that account find it unnecessary to defend the Later Avesta as authoritative for contemporary Zoroastrianism. Their common maxim is “Back to the Gathas.” This modern impulse thus to go back to “primitive” Zoroastrianism is probably to be associated with the founding in 1851 of the Rahnumae Mazdayasnan Sabha, a society that has sought “to dissuade Parsis from superstitious and un-Zoroastrian beliefs and to present to them the teachings of the Prophet Zarathushtra in their original and pure form.”⁴⁹ Further impetus was given to reform when the K.R. Cama Oriental Institute was founded in Bombay in 1916. While the Institute's objective was not reform but the promotion of scholary inquiry, the results have certainly aided the cause of reform by indirection—that is, by supplying reformers with knowledge of how Zoroastrian traditions in particular evolved and with criteria for distinguishing between their historical and mythopoeic elements. Today, neither the Sabha nor the Institute (where, since its founding, the Sabha has centered its educational activities) serves as a vigorous generator of reformist sentiment, but their legacy has been the diffusion of such sentiment among many individual members of the Parsi community.

The theological element of this legacy is characterized by what has become a basic aim of reform: the establishment of the claim that Zoroaster's own theology—and the theology that should therefore be normative—was a clear-cut monotheism. The first corollary is that the Gathas are the authoritative Scripture, so that all Later Avestan writings have their value determined by whether they accord with or depart from Gathic conceptions. A second corollary is that any doubt allowed by the Gathas as to whether the Bounteous Spirit and the Bountiful Immortals are attributes of God or other divinities he has created is resolved by insisting that they are the former—as Dhalla says, “pure abstractions, etherealized moral concepts, symbolic ideals, abstract figures.”⁵⁰ As God's attributes and states of perfection, they constitute the ideals after which man should pattern his own life in order that he may be worthy of God's benefactions and of admission to the “Abode of good mind,” the “House of Song,” the Kingdom of God.

The avoidance of polytheism or theological dualism is not complete, however, until it is shown that Angra Mainyu as well is not a spirit of God's creation or a rival deity. The reform position taken by many is that the evil one of the “Twin Spirits” is to be understood as a simple admission of the fact that evil must exist since men choose it. There does seem to be no question but that the Gathas posit human freedom and regard righteousness as an empty concept unless man makes it his ideal or way of life by choice. It then follows by logical necessity that man may choose its opposite. And if that is so, then God did not create a separate spirit and give him an evil nature, or foreordain his choice to be evil; rather, he allowed the possibility of evil as the condition of there being any meaning for goodness. There is no cosmic spiritual entity that is Angra Mainyu. “He” is simply the spirit in which people act who live by lies, violence, and wrath. According to one reformer, the Devil and his hosts were, for Zoroaster, the priests of his time who “put the fear of the Devil and demons in men and induced them into ceremonies to scare these away.”⁵¹ Dastur Bode sees Zoroaster as solving the problem of evil by declaring that “evil is not an entity or a being: it is only the twin mentality and relativity in the human mind.”⁵²

One area of doctrine about which reformers say very little is that of eschatology. One may infer that the speculative imagination is not kindled by hope of a future kingdom of righteousness if the prospect is that there will be no then-living Zoroastrians to aid in its inauguration. Lay reformers are preoccupied with trying to initiate change in traditional practices which they believe are the causes of the community's declining numbers. This leaves theological reflection to the priests among whom there are but a few of reform temper. Among these few, Dastur Bode is probably the most published spokesman, and he spares but a few paragraphs for eschatology in writings otherwise devoted to commending Zoroastrianism as a religion for modern man. His vision is one of a final judgment, the annihilation of all evil by ordeal, and a new everlasting heaven and earth. “Zarathushtra's message,” he writes in succinct condensation of his eschatological doctrine, “is full of hope, optimism and cheer; the ultimate triumph of good and transmutation of evil into good are assured.”⁵³

Until that time, the reform view of human destiny is that the souls of the deceased may be safely left to the mercies of God who, if good, is also just. No demons need be frightened away or angels implored to guarantee safe passage of departed souls to the bar of judgment. That being the case, the polytheism of the funeral liturgies can be declared archaic and the rites be understood as having only the functions of honoring the dead and comforting the mourners.

Zoroastrian doctrine is obviously not one systematized and generally approved body of theological and philosophical tenets but several sets of tenets for each of which the claim is made that it represents early and therefore normative Zoroastrianism. “Early,” in its turn, can mean either Zoroaster's Gathic doctrines or the doctrines of the whole Avesta. Lack of agreement, however, is not necessarily ennervating. A religion can be the more vital the more vigorously its ideological bases are debated. The problem is that the community lacks the leadership able by training or motivated by desire (1) to winnow appealing and viable theological insights from the chaff of many accretions, (2) to explain and interpret the salvaged insights for successive generations, and (3) to submit the insights repeatedly to the tests which knowledge acquired from any quarter may pose.

The present situation is that there are the priests trained mainly in the proper conduct of ritual and recitation of the liturgical texts. They are unprepared to engage in theological construction. Then there are the scholars, some of them priests and others laymen, who have pursued studies in history, philology and philosophy. They have the tools requisite for advanced theological reflection, but few if any are wiliing to enter the arena of debate where they would be distracted and diverted from objective research. Unfortunately, the few who are willing seem unaware of their need to engage, additionally, in comparative, phenomenological, and sociological studies of religion if they aspire to become credible apologists rather than educated partisans. A narrow-gauge education, however “advanced,” cannot provide the perspectives necessary to appreciate Zoroaster's existential situation. Like all great prophets, Zoroaster was dealing with an immediate and preoccupying crisis. To do so decisively and successfully required addressing himself only to the questions and issues it involved and to answering only the questions thus raised. The task of fitting any prophet's thought into a total Weltanschauung that itself might have to be restructured to accommodate the new prophetic insight has always devolved upon his followers. This was the case with Zoroaster but it has not been understood by his followers, with the consequence that they impute to him one or another set of final answers to ultimate ontological questions when his one overriding concern was the moral crisis of his time. By then proceeding to regard their respective versions of his allegedly “total” system as eternally valid and immutable, they cut the nerve of that fresh inquiry which alone would bespeak fidelity to the prophet's spirit.

The climate of the last quarter of the century is thus not significantly different from that of half a century ago when Moulton found the Parsis anxious to preserve understanding of the aims and symbolism of their ceremonies but given to “credulity at one end, almost complete denial at the other …”⁵⁴ as regards systematic theology. Believers themselves are not lacking awareness of need for a fresh burst of theological creativity, but rites and customs are their overriding concerns in the 20th century. The same can be said of the Iranis and Westerners, though there is a difference. Those outside of India are having perforce to make their first order of business that of meeting the challenge of adjusting their practices and making them functional within societies which they have had no share (or early share) in shaping. They are meeting this challenge willingly and with reasonable concord. It may be their youth who, when the task is well along, may turn to the long-languishing discipline of theology and effect its renewal. The Parsis have their own way of responding to the pressures exerted by their more familiar but nevertheless changing society. It is to talk and wait, and wait and talk—which, because it is a way that postpones action also prevents moving on to other business. One would guess that it is not to the Parsis, therefore, that the new theologians are likely in any immediate future to be born.

Notes

1. The language of the Gathas we know only as Gathic because they are the only literature employing it that has been preserved. How many such hymns Zoroaster composed and were memorized by the priests of the Achaemenid period will never be known, for the five were all that were recalled or found when the Sasanids undertook the reconstruction of the Avesta in the original and for translation into the Pahlavi language. Even the five could be only imperfectly translated because Gathic had already become archaic before the priests supplemented the Gathas with their own compositions in Avestan—another language the name for which we are obliged again to borrow from the term denoting the literature itself, i.e., the Avesta. Progress has been made, in modern times, in decoding elements of the Gathas that baffled the Pahlavi translators; yet obscurities still remain. The translators were somewhat more successful with the Avestan language, inasmuch as it more nearly resembled both the Old Persian which supplanted it and their own Pahlavi or Middle Persian into which the Old Persian had evolved by Sasanian times.

   It will be helpful at this point to list the divisions of the reconstructed Avesta—the present canon representing only about one-fourth of the 21 Books (Nasks) which are believed to have composed the Avesta of Achaemenid times:

   1. The Yasna, of 72 chapters (Has), incorporating the 5 Gathas (17 of the chapters) and one later Gatha, the Gatha of the Seven Chapters (Haptanghaiti) that is not ascribed to Zoroaster. Prayers used in the worship of many deities, with some prominence given in the non-Gathic material to Haoma, the worship of whom was involved in all the many liturgical rites that included the use of the intoxicating or hallucinatory juice of the Haoma plant.

   2. The Visparad, of 23 chapters (Kardas) supplementing the Yasna. Invocations to angels used especially at 6 seasonal festivals called gahambars.

   3. The Videvdat (or, as often corrupted, Vendidad), of 22 chapters (Fargards), preserving the 21st and only completely salvaged Nask. A legal and liturgical book, “against demons,” consisting of regulations for avoiding, punishing, and atoning for evil, notably pollution. A work which Karl F. Geldner, in 1904, called “the Leviticus of the Parsis”—a phrase so apt that it has become common property by frequent usage.

   4. The Yashts, 21 invocations to divinities of various ranks, but especially angels, for whom days of the month are named.

   5. The Khordeh Avesta, or “Little Avesta,” often combined with the Yashts in one manuscript, and intended for priests' and laymen's use or for services attended by laymen. Principal parts are prayers (Nyaishes) to address to the Sun. (Mihr, the light of the Sun), Moon, Water and Fire; prayers to the genii presiding over the five divisions (Gahs) of each day; invocations to the genii of the 30 days of the month (Siroze); “words of blessing” (Afringans) for several purposes but notably to honor the dead and their souls. The only part of the Avesta using Pazand, a special liturgical version of Pahlavi, as well as Avestan.

2. Students of the religion, unable to agree on a resolution of the difference between such passages, are consequently also without agreement on what to call Zoroaster's theology. If he believed in only one Ahura Mazda with attributes, he was a monotheist (Zaehner's position in Dawn and Twilight, 50). If he believed that Ahura Mazda created other deities as aides, his system was essentially a polytheism or perhaps a henotheism (the term used by Boyce in “Zoroaster the Priest,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. XXXIII, Part 1 (University of London 1970), text and footnote 83, p. 36 (hereafter cited as BSO AS) and in her History of Zoroastrianism, Vol. I, pp. 192-203.) But suppose that Yasna 30: 3, with its reference to the twin spirits means exactly what it seems to mean; in that case, his system is an ethical, theological dualism. Simple dualism becomes a dualistic polytheism, however, if aides of spiritual nature are granted to each of the two protagonists. James W. Boyd and Donald A. Crosby in a sense combine two views. They find Zoroaster saying that when historical time began, there were already the two primordial spirits, but that in the course of their struggle, Ahura Mazda will prove to be the wise and powerful victor over the ignorant and artless Angra Mainyu. What began as a dualism will, when Angra Mainyu is annihilated, have become a monotheism! Boyd and Crosby, however, nowhere discuss the status of the Amesha Spentas or their opposite numbers. See their “Is Zoroastrianism Dualistic Or Monotheistic?” in JAAR, XLVII/4, (1979), 539-555.

3. Athravan was the generic word for priest used in the Avestan texts. It was related to atar—i.e., fire, the veneration of which was a Pan-Iranian phenomenon. See Dhalla, History, p. 129. “Catholic Zoroastrianism” is Zaehner's term, op. cit., p. 81. See pp. 79 ff. for explication of the difference between “catholic Zoroastrianism” and the prophet's “primitive Zoroastrianism.”

4. Boyce, BSO AS, XXXIII, I (1970), 24.

5. Objectors to some part or all of this conclusion come from many quarters. Many Zoroastrians, stung by accusations that their religion is an outright polytheism, find the Gathas strictly monotheistic and are not satisfied with saying that Zoroaster “tended” toward monotheism. The priests, too—most of whom lack higher education in theology—have learned to affirm Zoroaster's monotheism; yet with few exceptions, they grant the Amesha Spentas and the Yazatas the status of subordinate deities—and this without any awareness of contradiction.

   Zaehner and Boyce typify the marked difference there can be among scholars. Though Zaehner sees radical discontinuity between the “pure monotheism” of the prophet's Gathas and the unabashed polytheism of the Later Avesta, Boyce finds in both a fairly consistent “henotheism.” The difference, for her, would be that Zoroaster's Gathic views are metaphysically the more exalted and his system of thought deepened by thorough-going ethicization.

   It would seem that the “monotheists” may err in expecting the first real critic of an ancient polytheism to make the gigantic leap to pure monotheism all at once. At the same time, an argument such as that of Boyce distinctly underestimates the measure in which a prophet's lofty ideals are inevitably and necessarily made more concrete and common when less charismatic disciples fall heir to the task of making the faith succeed with the masses.

6. Karl F. Geldner, “Avesta Literature,” Avesta, Pahlavi, and Ancient Persian Studies, in honor of the late Shamo-ul-Ulama Dastur Peshotanji Sanjana, First Series, ed. by Karl J. Trubner and Otto Harassowitz (Strassburg, 1904), p. 8.

7. Yasna 44.

8. See especially Yasht 10.

9. Yasht 5.

10. Yasht 13.

11. We should add to those mentioned: Haoma, the plant-god, son of Ahura Mazda (Yasna 11), whose repeated immolation bestows immortality upon the worshippers of Mithra (Yasht 10, the hymn specifically honoring Haoma) so that he becomes, in effect, the usurper of the function of the Bountiful Immortal, Ameretat; Sraosha (the state of being obedient for Zoroaster) who in the later tradition is clearly a yazata type of deity rather confusedly conceived as both exercizing some of the same essential functions as Mithra (e.g., routing evil and protecting good men on earth) and as exercizing these only for Mithra as his subordinate (Yashts 11, 12, and 10); Rashnu, another associate of Mithra whose functions overlap with his as confusedly as do those of Sraosha (Yasht 10).

12. This is Boyce's tack when, in minimizing the difference between the religion of Zoroaster and that of the Later Avesta, she says, “All religious acts in Zoroastrianism are, however, first devoted to Ahura Mazda, whatever the dedication of the particular service [for which the Avesta provides the liturgical text]” (BSO AS, XXXIII, I [1970], p. 36). But pious genuflection can be made with or without a sense of actual dependence. There are other instances as well of Boyce's inattention to the necessity of having to distinguish, from time to time, between formal theory and what de facto practice indicates is functioning belief.

13. As Moulton—who did distinguish, perhaps too puristically, between theory and practice—remarked, “The monotheistic theology is preserved, but it can hardly be said that monotheistic religion remains” (The Treasure of the Magi, p. 100).

14. For the dualist argument, Dhalla has pointed us to the Pahlavi tracts, chiefly the Shikand Gumanik Vijar, Zatsparam, Dadistan-i Denik. and Bundahishn (as translated in Sacred Books of the East). These agreed that God could not be father of both the Good Spirit and the Evil Spirit without becoming responsible for evil. Ahriman, then, had to be an independent being co-existent and at least temporally co-equal with Ohrmazd. In the end, of course, Ahriman would be vanquished and annihilated. These ideas explain why the Bounteous Spirit was subsumed in Ohrmazd; there was no logical need for him in a theology that pitted the devil directly against God (Dhalla, History, pp. 384-397).

15. An instance of expanding the mythological and legendary content of belief is a tract named for its author, Arda Viraf. It is a visionary's account of what he experienced in visiting both heaven and hell during a week-long trance.

16. Man and animals, fire, metal, earth, water, and plants. See the “roster” of the Amesha Spentas, above, p. 16, with which this list of guardian functions may be aligned. It may be noted that reference to the Bounteous Spirit did not entirely disappear when dualistic theology made his position superfluous, but his functions became so much those of Vohuman (Av. Vohu Manah, Good Mind) that there was nothing he could do that Vohuman could not do just as well.

17. The confusion persists in the Parsi community although those who have become good students of their own religion have gone back to the Avestan view of the eternal distinction between fravashis and souls. This may clarify a point in theology but, as we will see later, the amount of attention ritually bestowed on both fravashis and souls at the time of death and thereafter for as long as the dead are held in memory has prompted reformers among those students to treat ancestor-worship as a pejorative term and to accuse the orthodox of perpetuating forms that render the religion of more use to the dead than to the living.

18. See the Pahlavi works in English translation, in Sacred Books of the East, or Dhalla's organized description of their eschatology, op. cit., pp. 407-433.

19. Dhalla, op. cit., p. 289. Persons familiar with the Christian doctrine of Jesus' virgin birth, and inclined to regard it as original and unique, have this Zoroastrian doctrine—already several hundred years old when Jesus was born—to take account of. They will find it relevant to read available studies of the diffusion of ideas among Middle Eastern cultures during the centuries of first Persian and then Greek imperial rule.

20. A part of this doctrine is that Soshyans will have the aid of a number of remembered heroes of the faith. Given immortality for their bodies when they departed from the world, they will return to help in the restoration of the world to its original state of perfection. It is a notion which, as we will see, is important to Zoroastrians of the sect, Ilm-e-Khshnoom.

21. The age of 15, in pre-modern Zoroastrian times, was the rough equivalent of 20 or 21 in our more literate and technological cultures—i.e., in terms of entry into vocation, marriage, and social responsibility. Knowing that it was the same, of course, throughout the Middle East should give students a clue to understanding why Muslims took over this same motif of ages for resurrected believers when they borrowed the schematic outline of Pahlavist Zoroastrian eschatology as a general framework for their own doctrines of the last judgement and the end of history.

22. For those who are curious to know if the great Renovation will occur in their lifetime, the answer is No! Moulton used the dating derived by E.W. West from the Pahlavi texts to place the first soshyant in the 4th century a.d. and the second in the 14th century. The date suggested for the third, Soshyans, is a.d. 2398 See Moulton, op. cit., p. 105.

23. Dhalla, op. cit., p. 440.

24. Ibid., p. 445.

25. Boyce, “Zoroastrianism,” HR II, pp. 233 and 211.

26. See Moulton, op. cit. It was one of the sources I put over for perusal until I completed my first visit of investigation. Despite the frankness of Moulton's bias—he was pejorative in treating Zoroastrianism and unabashedly apologetic as a Christian—I found his principal observations strikingly identical to my own. It seemed in fact, that either his book had been mistakenly pre-dated by more than 50 years or he had placed the religion in a time capsule before he left for me to discover intact and unchanged a half-century later.

27. Boyce, “Zoroastrianism,” HR II, pp. 233-234.

28. See Moulton, op. cit., pp. 171 and 173, and Boyce, ibid., p. 230. A paucity of theologians, however, should not prompt the inference that there are no critical scholars among Zoroastrians of the modern period. But with regard to this, see my observations later in this chapter.

29. Ervad Dr. M. D. Karkhanavala, B.A., M.Sc., M.S., Ph.D., “Parsis, be true Mazdayasni-Zarathoshtis,” in Memorial Volume, Golden Jubilee of the Memorial Column at Sanjan 1920-1971 and The Birth Centenary of Late Mr. Jehangirji Jamshedji Vimadalal, ed. N. E. Turel and Prof. K.C. Sheriar (Bombay: Bombay Zoroastrian Jashan Committee, 1971), p. 94.

30. Behram D. Pithawala, “Era of Lord Zarathushtra—As deciphered from the letters in his Holy Name,” Memorial Volume, ibid., pp. 177-178. Internal evidence indicates the author's agreement with the esoteric beliefs of Ilm-e-Khshnoom.

31. See Boyce, “Zoroastrianism,” HR II, p. 230.

32. Dhalla, op. cit., p. 489.

33. Rustom Masani, Zoroastrianism (USA: The Macmillan Company, 1968).

34. Ibid., pp. 48 and 64.

35. Khurshed S. Dabu, Message of Zarathushtra (2nd ed.; Bombay: The New Book Co., Private Ltd., 1959), pp. 20-21. The author, from 1948 to 1977 the Dastur (High Priest) of Wadiaji Atesh-Beheram, Parsi Fire-Temple of Bombay, re-affirmed these theological views in an interview on November 19, 1971, when he was the eldest of Bombay's Parsi priests in active service.

36. Ibid., pp. 23-26.

37. Dabu, A Hand-Book of Information on Zoroastrianism (Bombay: P.N. Mehta Educational Trust, 1969), pp. 47-48 (hereafter cited as Hand-Book).

38. A confidant was Framroze Sorabji Chiniwalla, who attempted to explain the doctrine with exquisite confusion, in Essential Origins of Zoroastrianism, Some Glimpses of the Mazdayasni Zarathoshti Daen in its Original Native Light of Khshnoom (Bombay: The Parsi Vegetarian and Temperance Society of Bombay, 1942).

39. Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Parsees (Bombay: British India Press, 1922), p. 67 (hereafter cited as RCCP).

40. See ibid., p. 321.

41. Ibid., p. 183.

42. P.N. Tavaria, “Khshnoom: ‘Nirang’”, Parsiana, April 1967, pp. 24-25.

43. See Chiniwalla, op. cit., pp. 224-225.

44. Naigamwalla, Zarathushtra's Glorious Faith, op. cit., p. 129.

45. Tavaria, “Khshnoom,” Parsiana, February 1966, p. 25. The reader should not be surprised to learn that Zoroaster's body was not a mortal one but “of solid aura … lustrous and transparent.” The corollary is that he could not have been martyred by another mortal but was attacked by Satan himself whose body he shattered. “… the Prophet's luminous body elements were [then] dispersed and drawn back to their respective ethereal regions above …,” but such was the shock of the attack upon him that had he “allowed it to strike against the earth, it (earth) would have been pulvarized [sic]” (p. 26).

46. Tavaria, “Khshnoom: Numerological Expression,” Parsiana, November 1966, p. 23.

47. Tavaria, “Talismanic 81,000,” Parsiana, May 1966, p. 25.

48. Chiniwalla's work is now out of print, and Parsi Avaz, an eight-page Gujarati weekly devoted to propagating the cult, ceased publication in July 1974, its circulation having fallen from 3000 when it was founded in 1947 to 600 at the end. Whether the new bimonthly, Dini Avaz, launched in December 1975, will attract its predecessor's lost subscribers remains to be seen. As re Parsi Avaz, see Pervin Mahoney, “The Sound of Silence,” Parsiana, June-July 1974, p. 23; and for a brief account of the new publication and the interest in new classes, Sanober Marker, “Dini Avaz,” Parsiana, February 1976, p. 31.

49. Jehangir M. Ranina, “We Parsis,” Parsiana, February 1969, p. 7.

50. Dhalla, op. cit., p. 39.

51. Dara J.D. Cama, We Parsis, Our Prophet, and Our Priests (Bombay, 1966), p. 11. Cama, a Bombay real estate agent, is a lay reformer more sharp-tongued than most in his criticism of traditionalism.

52. Framroze A. Bode, “Religion and Modern Man,” a Reprint from Dipanjali, June 1967, New Delhi, p. 4 (of reprint). Dastur Bode, one of the few reformist priests of Bombay at midcentury, has in recent years lived part-time in California, lecturing and performing outer ceremonies there as in Bombay. Although as sympathetic to Vedanta as Dastur Dabu to Theosophy, his interest lies in relating the religion adaptively to contemporary need, whereas Dabu emphasizes mainly the importance of preserving traditions intact.

53. Ibid.

54. Moulton, op. cit., p. 170.