The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion

The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Religion series presents a collection of the most recent scholarship and knowledge about world religions. Each volume draws together newly-commissioned essays by distinguished authors in the field, and is presented in a style which is accessible to undergraduate students, as well as scholars and the interested general reader. These volumes approach the subject in a creative and forward-thinking style, providing a forum in which leading scholars in the field can make their views and research available to a wider audience.

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Miguel Angel Andres‐Toledo teaches at the Department of Classical Philology and Indo‐European at the University of Salamanca, Spain.

Alberto Cantera is Professor of Iranian Studies, Free University of Berlin, Germany.

†Yaakov Elman was the Herbert S. and Naomi Denenberg Chair in Talmudic Studies, Yeshiva University, New York, USA.

†John R. Hinnells was Professor of Theology, Liverpool Hope University, UK.

†Helmut Humbach was Professor of Comparative Linguistics, University of Mainz, Germany.

Philip G. Kreyenbroek is Professor Emeritus, University of Gottingen, Germany.

Shai Secunda is the Jacob Neusner Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism, Bard College, USA.

†Shaul Shaked was Professor Emeritus, Department of Comparative Religion, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Mitra Sharafi is Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School, USA.

Daniel J. Sheffield is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and John Witherspoon Bicentennial Preceptor, Princeton University, USA.

Yuhan Sohrab‐Dinshaw Vevaina is the Bahari Associate Professor of Sasanian Studies and Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK.

†Martin L. West was a Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, UK.

The editors first met in Vienna in 2007 at the 6th European Conference of Iranian Studies organized by the Societas Iranologica Europaea, where we were introduced to each other by Prods Oktor Skjærvø. In the following year, Yuhan S.-D. Vevaina spent six weeks as a research fellow at Michael Stausberg’s department at the University of Bergen (Norway), sponsored by the university, for which we both are very grateful. It was during this stay that the idea of putting together a companion volume first took shape and we subsequently met with Rebecca Harkin from Wiley Blackwell in November 2008 in Chicago at the American Academy of Religion Conference. After our proposal was favorably reviewed we started to invite contributors in May 2009. Some colleagues dutifully submitted their first drafts in 2010 as requested. Unfortunately, others kept us waiting until February of 2014 for their final versions. These delays reflect the fragility of our scholarly community, which for specific areas and themes depends almost exclusively on the singular competence of individual scholars, who cannot be replaced easily by others. Hence, the project was delayed considerably. We therefore thank all our colleagues for their patience and collaboration, which indeed is a very positive development in a field that in prior decades suffered heavily from often unpleasant rivalries between individual scholars and their “schools.” Now, in the early 21st century, even though most of us continue to disagree on fundamental questions, a new spirit of collegiality and collaboration has appeared that finds its expression in the present volume. In this spirit, we hope the Companion will lead to further collaborative projects in the future.

During the final stages of the gestation of this volume, we were assisted by Dr Anna Tessmann (a private scholar based in Heidelberg), who in spite of her other duties tirelessly helped us with the copyediting of all the manuscripts with an untiring eye for details and a commitment to consistency which we hope will be much appreciated by our readers. She also prepared the two indexes. The editors and contributors owe her a great debt of gratitude. We are also grateful to the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen for providing the funds that allowed Anna to assist us in our project.

We must also acknowledge Professor John Kieschnick and Rafal Felbur from the Buddhist Studies Program in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University for kindly helping us to edit the Chinese and Japanese translations and citations found in Professor Aoki’s chapter on East Asia, and we would also like to thank Dr Patrick Taylor for his translation of Jean Kellens’s article from French into English. We would also like to thank the referees for their detailed and helpful comments and critiques; we have done our best to have them incorporated.

The severe delays and other shortcomings of the work notwithstanding, for both of us this project has been a great learning experience and we hope that both general readers and specialists will find reading the volume an equally rewarding experience. Ultimately, we hope that readers will appreciate our basic motivation for producing this work, namely, our passion for the study of Zoroastrianism and our desire for this specialist knowledge to be shared in academia and with the public.

Bergen and Stanford, June 2014
Michael Stausberg and Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina

With the opportunity to publish a paperback version of the WBCZ, we have chosen to correct and update some stray errors and omissions. We have also selectively updated and augmented the references in the shared bibliography at the end of the volume to reflect the last half decade of recent publications, particularly new text editions and studies on topics we felt were missing or underrepresented in the original edition published in 2015. We would also like to acknowledge the passing of five of our most esteemed contributors: Yaakov Elman (1943–2018), John Hinnells (1941–2018), Helmut Humbach (1921–2017); Shaul Shaked (1933–2021); and Martin West (1937–2015). Each a trailblazer.

Bergen, Oxford, and Heidelberg, December 2021
Michael Stausberg and Yuhan Sohrab‐Dinshaw Vevaina with Anna Tessmann

Even though Zoroastrianism was relatively well studied in the early days of the comparative and historical study of religions (Stausberg 2008a: 562–564), scholarly interest has precipitously declined since, and the study of Zoroastrianism now largely operates in a disintegrated academic landscape (see Stausberg and Vevaina, “Introduction: Scholarship on Zoroastrianism,” this volume). In this volume, thirty-three scholars from ten countries seek to redress this situation by offering a comprehensive view of the state of the art in the study of Zoroastrianism in the early 21st century. While there are various companions to other religions (published in this series or by other publishers), this book is the first of its kind for Zoroastrianism. The scholarly books on Zoroastrianism in general (i.e., not covering specialized studies on particular texts, themes, or periods) published during the past thirty-five years can be divided into the following categories: shorter introductory volumes (Boyce 1979; Nigosian 1993; Clark 1998; Mazdāpūr 2003 [1382 in Persian]; Stausberg 2008b; Rose 2011a; Rose 2011b), selections of textual primary sources (Malandra 1983; Boyce 1984b; Skjærvø 2011a), a multivolume survey of Zoroastrian history and rituals (Stausberg 2002b; 2002c; 2004b), an as yet unfinished massive history of Zoroastrianism (Boyce 1975a; Boyce 1982; Boyce and Grenet with Roger Beck 1991; Boyce and de Jong, forthcoming), a lavishly illustrated volume with introductory essays (Godrej and Mistree 2002), an exhibition catalogue (Stewart 2013), and an ongoing and now largely online encyclopedic project on Iranian civilization that comprises numerous useful entries on Zoroastrian matters (the Encyclopædia Iranica, open access under www.iranicaonline.org). In sum, nothing comparable in scope to the present The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism has ever been published.

This multi-authored volume is not dominated by one single overarching view of Zoroastrianism. In fact, by putting this volume together we as editors have endeavored to respect the diverse voices of the contributors as we seek to collectively grapple with and perhaps move beyond normative takes on the “essential” identity of Zoroastrianism that can often be found in the older literature. We, the editors, do not believe in such a thing as an essence of Zoroastrianism that would provide the one authentic, real, or normative version of this historically and geographically diverse religion. As scholars we do not judge our sources in this light (even when the sources themselves make such claims), but our interests are of an analytic, critical, and historical nature, where we situate our sources in different historical contexts, attempt to understand them as driven by specific interests, and thus represent this historical diversity to a diverse readership. From our academic perspectives, we do not see Zoroastrianism as something given for one and all times or as simply the outcome of the words of the founder or prophet, but rather as a complex network of dynamic ongoing re-creations that its makers – believers and practitioners – are situated within, continually engage with, and often contest, or that we as scholars identify, in the light of our interpretative frameworks, as related to this trans-historical and transnational entity commonly referred to as “Zoroastrianism.” The latter, for example, is the case with material and visual remains in Central Asia, which make sense when interpreted as evidence for regional variations of Zoroastrianism which are, in certain striking cases, rather divergent from the more familiar cultural productions we find in textual and material sources from pre-modern Persian and the contemporary Iranian and Indian communities (see Grenet, “Zoroastrianism in Central Asia,” this volume). As scholars we are not in a position to arbitrate on the truth-value of any of the various attempts by Zoroastrians to represent the genuine and true vision of their religion as more authentic than that of their rivals, even though we can analyze to what extent these claims are consonant with earlier equally contested interpretations of Zoroastrianism. We therefore see it as our professional responsibility to analyze points of contrast or divergence between different understandings of this faith. What we describe as innovations may be dismissed by some Zoroastrians as aberrations or hailed by others as progress – both normative categories that are equally problematic for historical-critical research. The five main parts of this volume therefore present different facets of this scholarly agenda.

It could seem intuitively plausible for a discussion of Zoroastrianism to start with Zarathustra (Zoroaster), who is traditionally held to be the founder or prophet of the religion that in the modern age came to be called after him. Such a narrative strategy would build on the emphasis placed on Zarathustra in Zoroastrian sources. The inherent risk is simply conceptualizing the history of Zoroastrianism as a mere footnote to Zarathustra and thus placing the development of the religion under the intellectual spell of this remote point of reference. Since the exact time and homeland of Zarathustra continue to remain a matter of dispute, the first two chapters in Part I discuss this problem from both geographical and linguistic perspectives (Frantz Grenet and Almut Hintze respectively). Believers and many scholars alike hold Zarathustra to be the “author” of five enigmatic songs, the Gāthās, which are then often used to reconstruct the original message of the “prophet” and, by extension, “his” religion. The Gāthās, however, have yielded widely contrasting interpretations and translations in the 20th century and therefore, in order to not privilege one reading, we have invited four eminent scholars (Helmut Humbach, Jean Kellens, Martin Schwartz, and Prods Oktor Skjærvø), who have over the past decades made groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of these complex texts, to provide a synthesis of their current thinking on the Gāthās. We hope such a plurality of interpretations will prove stimulating to both specialist and general readers. The final chapter of this first part by Michael Stausberg looks at the trajectories of the figure of Zarathustra in the periods after the Gāthās, when he was cast in the role of the foundational individual by Zoroastrian sources and came to signify whatever ideal the religion was and is supposed to mean in the context in question. The chapter also addresses non-Zoroastrian engagements with the figure of Zarathustra and examines various modern visual representations and discursive appropriations of the “prophet.”

Part II presents a survey of Zoroastrian history and Zoroastrian communities from antiquity to the present and thereby situates the Zoroastrian tradition(s) in different historical and geographical contexts. Three chapters deal with Zoroastrianism and Zoroastrian communities in the course of Iranian history, from the time of the pre-Islamic empires (Albert de Jong) through the pre-modern Islamic periods (Touraj Daryaee) to the modern and contemporary Iranian Zoroastrian communities (Michael Stausberg). Chapters on the Caucasus (Albert de Jong) and Central Asia (Frantz Grenet) in pre- and early Islamic times survey regional versions of Zoroastrianism beyond the Persian orbit; these regions show some rather distinctive characteristics when compared to Persian Zoroastrianism that is often taken as the normative model for the religion. Nowadays, the majority of Zoroastrians live in India, where the Parsis, as they are known and self-identify, can look back to a long history, which is here reviewed by John R. Hinnells. Since colonial times, Parsis and later also Iranian Zoroastrians have settled in large parts of the world; these Zoroastrian diasporas, which have created novel organizational and material infrastructures, comprise multisited networks, where the negotiation of Zoroastrian identities occur with great intensity (John R. Hinnells). During the past twenty years new information technologies have allowed Zoroastrians across the globe to engage in translocal and transnational networks of communication with their fellow practitioners in an unprecedented manner. Via the Silk Road there were mercantile and religious connections to East Asia already in precolonial times, yet the East Asian part of the Zoroastrian world often tends to be overlooked in scholarship. In this volume, Takeshi Aoki reviews the history of Zoroastrianism in East Asian countries from the pre-Islamic period to the contemporary age. In addition, this chapter also provides a survey of East Asian scholarship on Zoroastrianism, which is often ignored in the West regrettably because of language barriers.

Part III of our Companion is called Structures, Discourses, and Dimensions. Instead of merely providing lists of deities and their attributes and narrated actions, Yuhan S.-D. Vevaina discusses theologies and hermeneutics, i.e., reflections as found in Zoroastrian Middle Persian (Pahlavi) sources on the status and functioning of the divine actors and their relationships to humans, the ways these statements are generated in the form of scriptural interpretation, and the teaching and transmission of religious knowledge. Antonio Panaino analyzes the structure of the cosmos and the place of astrology in ancient Zoroastrian sources and points to the importance of Iran in the transmission of astrological lore between East and West. Carlo G. Cereti recounts the mythological narratives relating to the beginning of the world, the figure of Zarathustra, and the events predicted to unfold at the end of time. Jenny Rose discusses the gendered nature of the divine world, the division of labor in religious and ritual practice along gender lines, the relationships between sexuality and ideas of purity and pollution, the different social, legal, and ritual status of women and men, and their respective expected roles and access to power. Maria Macuch provides an overview of the general principles of Zoroastrian law, the main spheres of legal regulation and legal procedure in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic sources, followed by Mitra Sharafi’s discussion of the modern reinventions and constructions of Zoroastrian (Parsi) law and the ways in which Zoroastrians have engaged with colonial and civil law to serve their identitarian needs as minority communities through various forms of boundary maintenance.

Part IV covers religious practices and religious sites. The first chapter reviews the question of ethics in Zoroastrianism, a religion which has been interpreted as being primarily ethical in nature by certain influential scholars of the past. Alberto Cantera distinguishes between rituals as an arena for moral intervention of humans in the cosmic events and morality in a broader sense, where ethics have become a dominant theme in Zoroastrian religious thought (including the understanding of law). Prayer is a central religious practice in Zoroastrianism, as in several other religions, but Firoze M. Kotwal and Philip G. Kreyenbroek point to differences between typical Western and Zoroastrian understandings of the nature and function of prayer before turning to the history of prayer in Zoroastrianism from the earliest sources to contemporary practices. The human body is the key site of ritual practice and conceptions of notions of purity and pollution, which are structuring elements of Zoroastrian theologies, their views on the cosmos, the ecosystem, space and the human being, social relationships, and the systems of ritual actions and obligations. Alan V. Williams analyzes Zoroastrian claims regarding the origin and removal of impurity and examines the ways in which these embodied practices construct order at the level of the individual, society, and the cosmos. Michael Stausberg and Ramiyar P. Karanjia address different forms and types of rituals and some of their structural principles and modes of organization, whereas Jenny Rose looks at collective celebrations timed according to the religious calendar and their historical developments from the earliest sources to contemporary practices in the Iranian and Indian communities. This part ends with Jamsheed K. Choksy’s review of the history of Zoroastrian religious sites and structures, mainly temples and funerary structures (such as the so-called “Towers of Silence”), from the Achaemenid period to the present communities in India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Iran.

Part V contextualizes the “Good Religion,” as pre-modern Zoroastrian sources referred to it, in its historical intersections with other religions and cultures. The organization of this section follows a historical timeline based on when Zoroastrianism came into contact with the other religions and cultures. Prods Oktor Skjærvø begins with the Indo-European and Indo-Iranian heritage of the Avestan texts, inherited similarities and cultural differences between Avestan and Old Indic texts and poetry, myths and mythological geography, names and functions of deities and demons and shared ritual features. (See Stausberg 2012b for a longer historical survey that also covers later Hinduism; a commissioned chapter on this topic for this Companion unfortunately did not materialize nor were we able to include a chapter on Buddhism.) Judaism continues to share a long history with Zoroastrianism from the 6th century BCE to the present; in their chapter, Yaakov Elman and Shai Secunda mainly focus on the rather intensive Jewish–Zoroastrian interactions in late antique Mesopotamia as found in rabbinic and Pahlavi sources. A survey of the intellectual fascination with Zoroastrianism and the Persians by writers from different periods of the Classical world (Martin L. West) is followed by a review of the question of the Zoroastrian background of Mithraism, or the “romanization” of the Iranian deity Mithra (Richard L. Gordon). Marco Frenschkowski reviews intersections between Christianity and Zoroastrianism from early Christianity to the early Islamic period; he also pays attention to persecution of Christians in Sasanian Iran and Zoroastrian critiques of Christian doctrines. Manichaeism, which originated in the 3rd century CE, actively accommodated Zoroastrian themes in its self-fashioning and proselytization in the Iranian world. Manfred Hutter analyzes Zoroastrian topics in Manichaean writings and the mutual polemics between Manichaean and Zoroastrian authors. Islam emerged at the periphery of Iranian culture but its spread has fundamentally altered the societal role and shape of Zoroastrianism during the past millennium or so. Shaul Shaked addresses the attitude towards Zoroastrianism in early Islamic sources and their views of Zoroastrianism, Iranian and Zoroastrian influences on early Islam, Middle Persian writings translated into Arabic, and Zoroastrian polemics against Islam. Philip G. Kreyenbroek looks at minority communities whose religious centers lie in Kurdish-speaking regions, the Yezidis and Yarsan (also know as Ahl-e Haqq or Kaka’is), and their shared traits with Zoroastrianism. He points to the lasting and pervasive influence of an earlier Iranian religious tradition centering on the figure of Mithra in these regions. Finally, the Bahā’ī Faith, which originated in the second half of the 19th century in Iran, has since its beginnings had interactions with Zoroastrians and relatively numerous Zoroastrians converted to this new religion. Moojan Momen analyzes factors facilitating these conversions, later separation, integration and intermarriages between both religious communities, and more recent conversions by Zoroastrians who in many ways contributed to the development of the Bahā’ī Faith.

The final part (VI) of this Companion functions as an appendix that readers can draw on when reading the essays and that, we hope, will prove valuable for further engagement with Zoroastrian studies. It recapitulates the four main groups of primary textual sources. Miguel Ángel Andrés-Toledo gives a brief synopsis of the Avestan texts, the Avestan manuscripts with Middle Persian (Pahlavi) translations, and the Middle Persian writings arranged according to periods of origin from the third to the nineteenth centuries. The chapter lists editions, translations, and studies of the sources. Since these sources are relatively well studied, this chapter is meant to provide a useful recapitulation of existing scholarship. The two chapters by Daniel J. Sheffield on Zoroastrian writings in New Persian and Gujarati, on the other hand, deal with texts which are poorly studied, have not been studied at all, or were until recently altogether unknown, even to scholars of Zoroastrianism. These chapters therefore do not merely summarize extant studies but present original research. In particular, the texts in Gujarati remain a virtually untapped source for the study of Zoroastrianism; its neglect in research results from the disintegrated research landscape that will be discussed in the Introduction to Scholarship on Zoroastrianism by the editors.

The bibliographical references to the individual chapters have been compiled into a shared bibliography at the end of the volume, which thereby can serve as a comprehensive and up-to-date early 21st-century bibliography of Zoroastrian studies. Most chapters are provided with suggestions for further reading.