Zoroastrian practice and the magi

What is attested

The evidence for Iranian religious practice is stratified by period and radically uneven between the strata, and the single most important discipline in writing about it is refusing to let one stratum stand in for another. For the Achaemenid period (c. 550–330 BCE) we have royal inscriptions in Old Persian, a large administrative archive in Elamite, a handful of monuments, and Greek observers. For the Sasanian period (224–651 CE) we have Middle Persian inscriptions cut by a priest in his own name, coins, excavated fire sanctuaries, ossuaries, and — for the first time — the Avestan liturgical corpus committed to writing. Between those two bodies of evidence lie roughly five centuries in which the documentation thins almost to nothing. The Avestan texts themselves belong linguistically to a period earlier than either.

The Achaemenid royal inscriptions name Ahuramazda persistently and prominently. Darius I at Bisotun credits his kingship and his victories to Ahuramazda; later texts of Darius and Xerxes invoke him as creator of earth, sky and mankind, and Xerxes' so-called daiva inscription from Persepolis records the suppression of a sanctuary of daivas and worship of Ahuramazda in accordance with arta. What these texts do not do is equally important: no Achaemenid royal inscription names Zarathustra, quotes or alludes to an Avestan text, or uses a term corresponding to "Zoroastrian." The king's religion is Mazda-worship expressed in a royal idiom; whether it was Zoroastrianism in any sense a Sasanian priest would have recognised is an inference, not a datum.

The Persepolis Fortification Archive is the only large body of contemporary documentation of Achaemenid cult practice. Excavated at Persepolis in the 1930s, these Elamite administrative tablets record disbursements of grain, flour, wine, beer and livestock from royal storehouses across Persis and Elam in the years roughly 509–493 BCE; Richard Hallock published 2,087 of them in 1969 and thousands more remain in study. Among the recipients are religious officiants drawing rations for named deities, and the picture is emphatically plural: Ahuramazda appears alongside Elamite Humban and Napiriša, Semitic Adad, and gods otherwise unknown. Priestly titles appear, including šatin and the Elamite makuš, cognate with Greek magos. A ceremony called lan recurs constantly in the disbursement records. Nothing in the archive says what the lan ceremony consisted of, and specialists have argued that it was neither a specifically Zoroastrian rite nor specifically directed to Ahuramazda. The tablets show the imperial administration underwriting a mixed cultic economy — which is not the same thing as an established church.

The Greek testimony is contemporary but external. Herodotus, writing in the mid-fifth century, reports that the Persians erect no images, temples or altars, that they sacrifice on high ground, and that a magus must stand by chanting a theogony while the offering is prepared; separately he reports that the magi kill ants, snakes and creeping things, and that a corpse is not buried until torn by a dog or a bird. Some of this is corroborated — corpse exposure and the later ossuary tradition line up — and some of it is contradicted by the archaeology, since the two limestone plinths in the sacred precinct at Pasargadae and the relief on Darius's tomb façade at Naqsh-e Rustam, showing a king standing before a raised fire holder, both point to formal cult installations. Herodotus also identifies Mithra as a female deity equated with Aphrodite Urania, which is wrong as it stands, and is usually explained as a confusion with the goddess Anahita, whom Greeks did equate with Aphrodite. Either way it is a useful reminder of how his information reached him.

From the third century CE the evidence changes character entirely. The high priest Kartir left inscriptions at Naqsh-e Rustam, on the Kaʿba-ye Zardošt, at Naqsh-e Rajab and at Sar Mashhad — the only non-royal figure of the early Sasanian empire known to have been granted a series of monumental rock inscriptions in his own voice. He records serving successive kings, founding fires, appointing priests, and taking action against other religious communities within the empire. Sasanian silver coinage from Ardashir I onward carries a fire altar on the reverse. This is the first point at which the evidence shows an organised, state-backed priestly hierarchy with a programme. It is also the period in which the Avestan texts, transmitted orally for centuries by priests, were written down in a purpose-built alphabet devised for the task. That written archetype is lost; the oldest surviving Avestan manuscripts belong to the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE — the manuscript K7a carries a colophon date of 637 Y. whose Gregorian equivalent is uncertain, read as 1268, 1278 or 1288 and by some as belonging to a later copy, while the oldest securely dated copies were completed at Cambay in 1323/24. The liturgy we can read is therefore separated from its composition by well over two thousand years of controlled oral and then scribal transmission.

How the rite worked

As performed in living Zoroastrian practice and as reconstructable from the manuscripts, the central liturgy is the Yasna, a service of seventy-two sections in Avestan performed by two priests — the celebrant zōt and the assistant rāspī — in a ritually purified precinct, in modern practice in the morning. Its textual core is the seventeen Gathic chapters (Yasna 28–34, 43–51, 53) and the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti (Yasna 35–41), both in Old Avestan and both at a stage of Iranian comparable to Rigvedic Sanskrit — a statement about the language, not a date for the service. The service centres on the preparation and consumption of haoma: in observed modern practice the plant is pounded in a metal mortar, mixed and filtered, the resulting parahōm is consecrated during the recitation, and the zōt drinks it at a fixed point in the text. A bundle of rods called the barsom is manipulated through the ceremony; water drawn pure at the start is returned at the end as a libation. The tradition's own norm is that nothing in the service is improvised: it is a recitation with fixed manual acts attached at fixed textual points. How closely any historical performance met that norm is not something the sources allow us to check.

That description is therefore a composite of the Avestan manuscripts and of later and modern Zoroastrian practice. How much of the sequence goes back to the Achaemenid period cannot be established directly, because no Achaemenid-era source describes a Yasna. Strabo, writing under Augustus, describes magi tending perpetually burning fires in enclosures, wearing felt caps with cheek-pieces, and holding bundles of rods while they chant over the offering — which is recognisably the barsom and recognisably a fire cult, five centuries after Herodotus and two before Kartir. Herodotus's earlier account of sacrifice without altar, fire, libation, flute or garland, the meat laid on soft herbage and carried away by the sacrificer, describes something notably plainer. Whether the difference is change over time, regional variation, or two outsiders misreading what they saw is not resolvable from the sources.

Cost and personnel are the parts we can actually measure, and they come from the Persepolis tablets rather than from any liturgical text. Officiants drew fixed quantities of commodities from royal stores against named deities and named ceremonies, on a recurring basis, administered like any other disbursement in the imperial system. That tells us the cult was salaried and routinised at state expense, that it operated across multiple towns in Persis and Elam, and roughly how expensive a given ceremony was in barley, wine and small cattle. It tells us nothing about the words spoken. The gap between the accounting evidence and the liturgical evidence is total: the two bodies of material never touch.

Purity governed the whole system, and the elaborate purity code — regulations on corpse contact, the ritual bath, the dog's gaze at the bier, the treatment of bodily pollution — is set out in the Videvdad, a Young Avestan text of contested date. It prescribes. Corpse exposure followed by collection of the dry bones is independently attested by Herodotus for the magi and by ossuaries (astodans) excavated in Persis, Sogdia and Central Asia, so the general practice is real. But Achaemenid kings were laid in rock-cut tombs at Naqsh-e Rustam and Persepolis, and Cyrus in a built tomb at Pasargadae. Whether those bodies were exposed first — as the ossuary practice would allow — or treated some other way is not recorded; Herodotus says Persians other than the magi coated the body in wax before burial. Royal practice cannot be read off the rite the magi are described as following.