Descendants of Cyrus

by Thornton, Christopher;

  Yazd had other surprises. After a few more twists and turns I finally emerged onto the main street and hailed a taxi. Ten minutes later we pulled up to the entrance of the hotel, and I handed the driver a 100,000-rial note, more than enough to cover the fare. I stepped away, and he called after me.

  “Too much,” he said, in passable English, and gave me 50,000 rials change. At first I was sure the heat had addled my brain, but no, Yazd had a taxi driver who actually handed cash back when he was overpaid. He pulled away, and I was left holding a 50,000-rial note.

  The hotel where my tour operator had stashed me was a new addition to Yazd, but it had been built to resemble an elaborate residence from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, with the rooms facing a central courtyard and the requisite pool and bubbling fountain. Each morning I had breakfast at one of the courtyard tables with Laurel and Hardy, the names I had given to the two parakeets that spent most of the day perched on the crossbeams of two wooden posts near the breakfast tables. I called them Laurel and Hardy because they spent most of their time fluttering and slapping each other with thickly feathered wings and squawking in what sounded like garbled Farsi, much like the comic duo, without the Farsi, from the early days of cinema. Laurel was colored deep red, with white feathers under his chin. Hardy was pleasingly plump, with a thick cover of ermine blue feathers and a tail that flopped furiously every time he let out a sharp squawk or screech, or whenever the antics of Laurel left him flustered. After a few days, I noticed a pattern in their diurnal rhythms: Hardy was more of an early bird, for he usually won the morning spats, while Laurel came alive in the afternoons, after I had returned from a day’s sightseeing and was enjoying a boozeless beer. Then he shrieked more loudly and poked Hardy with his beak because his guard was down. The battles continued the entire time I was in Yazd—Laurel and Hardy, or Hardy and Laurel, sharing the same perch but never at peace. Always they found something to bicker over—a prize morsel scooped off a breakfast plate, or the direction of the wind when there was nothing else to rile their feathers.

  Laurel and Hardy’s antics aside, the courtyard was an ideal setting for breakfast. In those brief moments when Laurel and Hardy paused in their bickering, the tinkling of the fountain overcame all other sounds, the blue tiles beneath the water reflected the overhead sky, and a light morning breeze, which had yet to bear the blazing heat of day, stirred the branches of the trees that arched overhead.

  It would have been easy to never emerge for breakfast at all, but stay in the cool cocoon of my room. It was decorated like a museum, littered with gewgaws that evoked the glories of the Silk Road. Standing on the tables, and tucked into wall niches that served the purpose of shelves, were ceramic vases and pots and metalwork, a specialty of Yazd, in the form of a brass ewer and a serving tray decorated in ornate floral patterns. Standing on the side tables were glass beakers and a pair of brass candlesticks, and lying on the floor was a trio of hand-woven carpets. As beautiful as these items appeared, they were just a sampling of what, over the years, had been loaded onto the backs of camels before beginning the long trek eastward, into neighboring Afghanistan and then Pakistan.

  Trade along the Silk Road began in the third century, during the brief Parthian dynasty. Tucked between the Achaemenid and Sassanid dynasties, the Parthian period had rulers who saw the value of the overland trade and placed a tax on all goods entering from the east. The trade was so important to the wealth of both Iran and China that the Chinese dispatched two negotiators to Iran to argue for the free flow of goods. The cities along the road, not only Yazd but Kerman, Islamabad, Tous, Peshawar, Bukhara, Kabul, and Herat, grew into wealthy trading centers with storehouses of valuable goods. In the courtyards of the caravansaries that surrounded the local bazaars, the languages spoken represented the lands that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Pacific—Turkish and Arabic, Farsi and Hindi, Uzbek, Kazakh, and Chinese.

  The trade continued for over a thousand years, until improvements in boatbuilding technology made sea travel far safer and faster than the overland caravan routes, constantly vulnerable to sandstorms and plagued with bandits. But almost until the time of the European Renaissance, more goods of greater value were transported by the Silk Road caravans than any other trade route in human history. And more than goods were exchanged. Islam, along with the languages and cultures of the Muslim world, was carried east. Buddhism, along with spices, silk, and precious stones—jade and emeralds, rubies and sapphires—was brought west. On a side table in my room was a small porcelain vase decorated in floral patterns, with a mountain scene and flock of birds that marked it as a product of China.

  I could have remained in my room all morning and imagined myself the driver of a caravan sometime back in the first millennium, but the illusion would never have held up, for no camel driver worth a dirham would have wasted precious time admiring his own goods. Also, this was Yazd, and so the day demanded a visit to the place of fire, or temple of fire, formally known as the Yazd Atash Behram, one of the primary places of worship for local Zoroastrians and a place of pilgrimage for the religion’s global followers.

  If I had expected the Yazd Atash Behram to be a massive chunk of stone trying to mimic the temples of ancient Greece or Rome, I would have been disappointed. But I had no expectations, and so I wasn’t. In practice, Zoroastrian fire temples are typically simple affairs. The notion that the scale of the building should reflect the greatness of the deity it is meant to celebrate is a concept alien to Zoroastrianism. The Yazd Atash Behram is no different. Tucked into a sleepy back street lined with cypress and cedar trees, the Atash Behram better resembles a bourgeois manor house from somewhere in southeastern Europe. Built in 1934, its sole reason for being is to house an atash behram, or “victorious fire”—a continuously burning flame of which there are only nine in the world. The other eight are in India.

  The story of the flame is far more interesting than any building that could house it. If the tale is to be believed, it was first lit by the shah of the Sassanid dynasty in a fire temple in the district of Larestan in 470 CE. It was then moved to the city of Aqda, where it continued to burn for seven hundred years before it was relocated again, in 1173, to the nearby city of Ardakan. This time its stay was relatively brief—only three hundred years—before it was shipped to Yazd, where it is now tended by a Zoroastrian priest.

  Because of the number of tourists that traipse through, the Atash Behram breaks with some of the conventions of the traditional fire temple. It has an observation area for non-Zoroastrians to observe the long-burning flame, still alight in a bronze vase behind a curtain of tinted glass. A touch of verisimilitude is preserved, for behind the tinted glass the chamber surrounding the flame is dark except for the glow emanating from the flame itself, all designed to simulate the gloom of the inner sanctum of a Zoroastrian temple, where the flame would normally be burning.

  To imagine what it would have been like to have been an ancient follower of Zoroastrianism, I transported myself back a couple thousand years, when the world’s first monotheistic religion dominated the Persian Empire. Entering a fire temple, I would be barefoot and dressed in white, with a white cap to cover my head. If my wife was with me, which would have been possible, for there is no segregation of the sexes in Zoroastrian customs, she would also be clad in white, and her head would be covered with a white headscarf. I would hand an offering of sweet-smelling sandalwood to the priest, who would take it to the inner sanctum and place it on the fire using a pair of silver tongs. He would return bearing some of the ashes in a ladle, which I would smudge onto my eyelids and forehead. There would be no sermon, because the role of the priest is not to preach but receive the faithful and tend the sacred fire.

  The fire temple itself is something of an anachronism, for the use of a temple to house the sacred flame would have been alien to very early Zoroastrians. The Greek historian Herodotus described Zoroastrians in the fifth century BCE climbing to the tops of small hills to perform their fire ceremonie
s. The designation of fire to represent the spiritual core of the Zoroastrian belief system developed centuries later, as the imagery of light became associated with the essence of spirituality in many other faiths. “The Lord went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light,” reads the Book of Exodus, recounting the guidance the Israelites received while they wandered in the desert for forty years. The Christian Jesus is often described as “The Light of the World.” “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” and “In thy light we shall see light,” reads the Book of Psalms. “Let us walk in the light of the Lord,” said the Prophet Isaiah, for “the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light.”

  The dark-light polarity carried far beyond Zoroastrianism to the traditions of other faiths. Among the ancient Hebrews, the Qumran sect separated its own into the saved (“children of light”) and the damned (“children of darkness”). In the Chinese dichotomy of yin and yang, yang is light—ethereal and productive, and therefore a force for good—while yin is the reverse. The Hindu wintertime festival of Diwali celebrates the triumph of light over spiritual darkness. Gnostic thought, which developed in the first and second centuries, saw light and darkness representing spirit and matter, but the two are not equals in any spiritual sense. Evil forces arise from the material world, and there the human being acquires salvation by abandoning it for the world of light.

  In many other belief systems light represents enlightenment, or the illumination of the mind as well as the spirit. In the mythology of ancient Egypt, Apophis, the monster of darkness, represented by a serpent, each day threatens to devour Ra, the sun god. Of course he fails, and each day a new day dawns. The Pharaoh Amenhotep IV tried to create a sun cult in Egypt, but his tiptoe into monotheism was quashed by the religious powers. One of the major festivals on the ancient Roman calendar was one that paid homage to Sol Invictus, or the “Invincible Sun.” In the Aztec and Mayan belief systems, human sacrifices were needed to preserve a world order that was represented by the continuing life of the sun. Fast-forward to the present day: Let us not forget the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where memory of the fallen is symbolized by the eternal flame, never to be extinguished, just like the fire in the Yazd Atash Behram, which has burned much longer.

  Almost all religions acquire some of their appeal through a dose of mysticism and mystery, and the origins of Zoroastrianism are a little more mysterious than most. According to the Gathas, seventeen hymns composed by Zoroaster himself and included in the Avesta, Zoroastrianism’s primary scripture, the prophet was born somewhere near the border of Iran and present-day Afghanistan, perhaps as far back as 1500 BCE. He had six children, three boys and three girls, and he died around the age of seventy-seven. Most important, he is credited with bringing into the world the belief in a single, universal force from which all spiritual power emanates, in other words, the concept of monotheism. What is also known is that Zoroaster grew disenchanted with the popular polytheism of his time, with its ritual animal sacrifices and use of hallucinogenic plants in religious ceremonies. According to orthodox Zoroastrianism—in keeping with the myths familiar to other religions—Zoroaster retreated into the wilds and received a vision that became the foundation of his theology and a new way of framing the spiritual world. This attributed all of creation to a single source—Ahura Mazda, or the “Wise Lord.”

  According to the Zoroastrian view, the universe is riven by two competing forces: one that embodies the values of order, creation, and truth, or Asha; and one that is reflected in the negative forces of chaos, deceit, disorder, and “uncreation,” or Druj. Humans are caught up in this cosmic battle with an obligation to defend the forces of Asha against those of Druj. The task, as monumental as it sounds, is relatively simple. The responsibility of the human being is to combat Asha and Druj by promoting, and articulating, the three cardinal principles of Zoroastrianism: good thoughts (humata), good words (hukhta), and good deeds (hvarshta).

  Another fundamental principle of Zoroastrianism is the concept of free will. It thoroughly rejects any notion of predestination, common in Indian theology, and also the ancient Greek concept of Fate. The Zoroastrian believes that it is positive actions that quell the dark forces of the universe. Action is a necessary part of human existence and a potential force for good. To take this a step further, asceticism is spurned because it demands the denial of life experiences, even simple pleasure, which can fuel the forces of order. No Zoroastrian priest would think of retreating from the world like a Christian or Buddhist monk, for it is engagement with the world through positive, self-directed action that leads to the supremacy of Asha.

  It can’t be denied that there is a hint of self-interest in performing good works, for performing them also brings goodness to oneself, and in this respect Zoroastrianism could be seen as dipping into the Hindu notion of karma, or “what goes around comes around.”

  What is striking about many of the precepts of Zoroastrianism is how they laid the foundation for those of both Christianity and Islam, at the time still invisible on the theological horizon. Zoroastrianism advanced the concept of a dual universe, the individual possessing free will, the notions of heaven and hell as well as Judgment Day and the arrival of a messiah. In the Zoroastrian view, the end of time will be the victory of Ahura Mazda over the dark forces of existence, embodied in Angra Mainyu, which Christians came to call the “evil spirit.” Also, a savior will arrive (Saoshyant), who will revive the dead spirits, and all the world’s souls will then be judged according to their thoughts, words, and actions as they cross over the bridge that leads to the world beyond the earthly one. But humans are not alone throughout their earthly journey. Each is accompanied by a guardian spirit, or fravashi, which will be on hand to meet them at the final judgment.

  Contrary to both Christianity and Islam, a whiff of animism can be found in Zoroastrianism, for Zoroaster believed that the fundamental spiritual forces of the universe were to be found in the natural elements of earth, wind, water, and fire—wind as opposed to air because wind can be experienced in physical reality, while air remains abstract and ethereal, disconnected from physical, sensory experience. Furthermore, according to Zoroastrianism, fire and water are not opposing forces (there is a limit to duality, even in Zoroastrianism). Both possess purifying qualities and were the last to be created in the birth of the universe. To expand the dualistic view even further, according to Zoroastrianism, fire emerged from water, and it is fire that is the source of wisdom. Consequently, it is at the fire temple where Zoroastrians worship, and the image of fire, or light, has become the symbol of insight or inspiration throughout human history.

  Zoroaster had little luck selling his radical theological views to the Persians of eastern Iran. The religious powers saw his attack on ritual and his adherence to the belief in a single deity as an affront to the ruling order. After twelve years of proselytizing, he gained only one convert—his cousin—so he relocated to western Iran, where he had better luck. The king and queen of Bactria favored his views after hearing him debate the local religious authorities and decided to make Zoroastrianism the state religion.

  Slowly but surely, Zoroaster’s beliefs gained currency and began to spread throughout ancient Persia, so that by the beginning of the Achaemenid era, around 500 BCE, they had become the accepted faith of the Persian people. Zoroastrianism soon spread to the outer reaches of the empire, north to Armenia and Azerbaijan, and even beyond the empire, southeast to India. It suffered a setback in the fourth century BCE, following the invasion of Alexander the Great. The Greek conquerors burned the Avesta, Zoroastrianism’s sacred text, which contain the Gathas, poems written by Zoroaster that express his fundamental beliefs.

  Still, Zoroastrianism recovered, and all was well for the next thousand years. Then, in the middle of the seventh century, came the Arab invasion and with it the Islamic faith that had already swept the Arabian Peninsula. Defeats in the battles of Qadisiya and Nahavand
spelled the end of the Sassanid Empire and sent Zoroastrianism on the run. Fire temples were destroyed or converted into mosques, and many of the faithful fled inland, seeking protection in the greater isolation of the desert cities, such as Yazd.

  At first, the Arab-Muslim ruling caliphate in Damascus took a benign attitude toward the Zoroastrian Persians. There was little pressure to convert to Islam, but over time discriminating taxes and other oppressive polices stigmatized the Zoroastrians. Two hundred years later, rule over Persia passed to the Abbasid caliphate operating out of Baghdad, resulting in increasing oppression and even humiliation of the Zoroastrians. In the cities, where the ruling authorities could often persuade the local population to convert by offering economic enticements and other advantages, Islam was able to spread more quickly. The rural areas saw resistance harden, but by the tenth and eleventh centuries, Islam had become the dominant faith of previously Zoroastrian Persia, and the religion that had once spread across the empire was consigned to the hinterlands.

  There are few issues in Iran that don’t reflect the ever-growing rift between the more secular-minded city dwellers and the theologically driven religious figures in the government, and there is no reason why Zoroastrianism would be an exception. This is fully on display on the last Tuesday before March 21, or Noruz, the Persian New Year. This is the night of Chaharshanbeh-Souri, or the fire-jumping tradition, in which small bonfires are made both in the smallest villages and the residential streets of major cities, and celebrants take turns leaping over the flames so that the purifying element of fire will “burn away” the residue of the passing year and ignite the force of a new beginning.