ONE of the most learned and
cultivated of Indian sects, the Parsees are famous for exposing their dead in
Towers of Silence, walled spaces open to the sky above Bombay, where vultures
come and feast on the corpses. As followers of the ancient prophet Zoroaster,
or Zarathustra, the Parsees reject burial because it defiles the earth, and
reject cremation because it desecrates fire.
After
more than ten centuries, it is now the vultures which are dying off, the result
of a mystery virus. Zoroastrianism itself is said to be endangered worldwide
because of intermarriage: practitioners cannot convert to the religion; they
have to be born into it.
An
inquisitive, gently persistent former BBC documentary film‑maker has now
gone in search of the original Zarathustra, and produced a delightful,
rambling, informative book about his quest.
It
rambles, I dare say, because the truth is that Zarathustra’s life and
times are wrapped in the mists of the Bronze Age, some 3,500 years ago, and
only an ancient book of his
sayings has come down to us.
Most
people, if they have heard the name Zarathustra at all, know it from the
Richard Strauss music whose awesome opening bars introduce Stanley Kubrick’s
movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Yet
as Paul Kriwaczek explains, this prophet from the steppes Asia has a claim to
be one of the three great religious legislators of the world, alongside Christ
and Mohammed.
More
than 1,000 years before either was born, he taught the message of a single
universal god, of Heaven and Hell and the coming of a Messiah.
These
ideas were passed down directly to Judaism, and thence to Christianity, during
the 1,000 years or so of close association between the Jews and the Persians,
before the arrival of Islam They were put into words in what is now Iran,
around the time of the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great who, in the sixth
century BC, presided over the first multi‑racial, multi‑faith
empire from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush.
He
was succeeded by Darius, a practising Zoroastrian; among his subjects were the
Hebrews exiled from Judaea, and one of them, the biblical Ezra was charged
with returning to his homeland and reshaping Judaism as it was practised by
the exiles.
How much of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, entered Judaism is hard to say, but passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 300 years later, show how much the Jewish faith had accommodated itself by then to Zoroastrian beliefs about the end of the world.
These
included the image of paradise (the Persian word for a garden), and the idea
that the forces of good would be victorious at the end of time.
The
devil was also a Zoroastrian concept. In original Hebrew belief there was no
independent force of evil.
The
author’s journey takes him from a teaching college in Samarkand to ancient
dolmens outside the shattered city of Sarejevo, from the remains of a
Zoroastrian fire‑temple in northern Afghanistan to the snow‑covered
ruins of another temple by Hadrian’s Wall.
This
was one of several sites in Britain where the Roman legionaries practised their
own version of Zoroastrianism, venerating one of its Persian deities, Mithras.
Cold
and complaining he struggles up to the bleak summit of Montsegur in France,
where 500 Cathar heretics crammed into a fortified citadel, held out for ten
months before surrendering their last refuge to the might of the Roman
Catholic Inquisition, which proceeded to burn 220 of them.
The
Cathars followed Zoroastrian principles,
believing life was a struggle between opposing forces of good and evil, and
had to be lived in total honesty, striving for goodness and forgiving one’s
enemies.
Under
one name or another, these beliefs have survived the hostility of churches and
states down the ages, even though Zoroaster himself remains a shadowy figure
who largely exists through 2,000 years of commentaries on his hymns and
sayings.
His
religion, ancient as it is, remains unique in that it appears never to have
initiated wars, pogroms, massacres or inquisitions but remained true to its
values of ‘good words, good thoughts and good deeds’.
This
was the phrase of a templekeeper in a grove of cypress and myrtle in the stony
hills above Yazd in Iran, where Paul Kriwaczek ends his journey, listening to
an outdoor service attended by a handful of the 50,000 or so Zoroastrians left
in Iran.
As
for the Parsees, they have solved the problem of declining vulture attendances.
Solar reflectors have been installed in the five Towers of Silence, speeding
decomposition and silencing complaints about the smell.