ACCORDING to the Avesta, initiation into the Zoroastrian community, with full responsibility for one’s own religious and moral life, should take place at fifteen years of age (which in ancient Iran was regarded as the time of maturity). Among the Parsis this had been reduced to seven or eight, much as the age of confirmation has been reduced in some Christian communities, but the Irani villagers usually initiated their children at between twelve and fifteen years. In the old illiterate days a boy would prepare for the rite by going to the family priest to be taught by word of mouth the essential prayers —the Ahunvar and Ašəm vohu, the košti-prayers and the Sroš Baj. By the 1960s, with schools in every village and so few priests, it was the school teachers who made sure that the boys learnt these prayers from the Khorda Avesta (of which copies, printed in Bombay or Tehran, were readily to be had); and since it was they who had the trouble, it was usually they too who performed the simple ceremony, and received gifts in recompense from the family.
While the boy struggled to memorize the incompreheasible Avestan words, his mother would stitch him a sedra, the sacred shirt made from homespun undyed cotton, with the little pouch at the neck to be filled symbolically with good deeds, and a košti would be bought for him. Until the early decades of the twentieth century it was the priests themselves, in their purity, who wove the sacred cord, with its seventy-two threads, on a simple wooden frame. D. Khodadad still had a man-sized frame in his empty house in Yazd, and a woman from Mazra told me that she well remembered as a child seeing his uncle, D. Bahram, sitting in the courtyard of his Sharifabadi home and weaving the cords. The last košti woven by D. Khodadad himself, with continual recital of Avesta, was a specially thick strong one which was kept for funeral purposes. The wool for this (from a lamb or yearling sheep) was spun for him on a distaff
i See Yt. 8.13-14.
j.e. for tying the shrouded corpse to the bier.
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
237 by Jehangir Jamshidi, siace a spinning-wheel produced too fine a thread; and even for regular wear, D. Khodadad maintained, the košti should be sturdy, a real cord which a man could use for practical purposes if sudden need arose. (He cited in this connection the epic tale of Hom, who used his košti to bind Afrasiyab.) The urban Parsis have gradually, however, evolved a cord of exquisite fineness, spun by women of priestly families, which is suitable for wearing over their fine muslin sedras, and during this century the Iranis have slowly been following suit. But since the 1920s the work has become entrusted by them to lay women. In that decade a group of half a dozen priests instructed the women of Aliabad in the art (that village suffering then from drought and poverty); and as the dwindling band of priests had perforce to abandon the work under pressure of their other duties, this small village came to supply koštis for all Irani Zoroastrians. Then as Aliabadi women married into other places, they took their skill with them. Thus Sarvar from Aliabad, Turk Jamshidi’s wife, wove koštis in Sharifabad, and had taught her step-daughter Parichihr how to do so; and while I was in the village Piruza Belivani was struggling to acquire the skill though her uncle Paridun and a number of the other men still wore the thick, sturdy koštis woven for them by D. Khodadad, which naturally had a much longer life than the fashionably fine ones. (It was held to be improper, indeed useless, to pray with a košti in which a single thread was broken.)
The women undertook their task with high seriousness, and strove to maintain a strict standard of purity in weaving the košti. It was unthinkable, of course, that any woman should touch wool or frame while bi-namaz, nor could the work be done during the hours of darkness. The first košti which a girl wove by herself had to be given to a shrine. She would hang it on the wall, and whoever wished would take it and leave the money there. Some bestowed their first ten or more koštis in this way, and Piruza had vowed to give fourteen—one to each of the seven shrines of Sharifabad, one
3 The period of bi-namazi was regarded as lasting seven days, but the regula tions were relaxed a little after the third day (see above, p. 103); and Sarvar told me that once, when she had an urgent order for a košti, feeling herself to be clean on the sixth day, she made ablution, and wove one. But all that night she was tormented by bad dreams, in which she was alone among hostile, mocking Moslems, while Zoroastrians passed by without greeting her or going to her help. After that experience she never wove a košti again until the full seven days were over. For a photograph of her at work see PI. VIb.238
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES to each of the six great communal Pirs, and one to the Ataš Bahram of Yazd.
The first time that I myself witnessed an initiation ceremony (called in Dari sedra-pušun ‘putting on the sacred shirt) was in May, on the auspicious day of Ruz Dai-be-Din of Mah Dai by the tradi tional calendar, which is one of the name-day feasts of Ohrmazd himself. One of the three boys concerned was Rashid, Paridun Rashidi’s elder son. He went to school in the ordinary way that morning, and at about half-past ten the womenfolk of his family set off after him, gathering relatives and friends along the way, and meeting near the school the women of the other two families. (Sedra-pušun among the laity was very much a women’s affair, the men being at work in the fields.) The mother of each boy carried a large round tray, on which were the new sedra and košti, a set of clean clothes, and a big new handkerchief, all covered by a green cloth. Others in the group bore a lamp, greenery in a silver pot, rose-water, and sweetmeats. At the school the boys were in the playground. They had just been drawing water from the well, and the leather bucket lay wet and gleaming in the sunshine. We all went into the school hall, and the boys stood in orderly lines round the walls, while the women sat on benches put for them near the door. The three candidates took the trays and, leaving the koštis behind, departed to make ablution and put on their sedras and clean clothes. Rashid returned wearing a beautiful old wool-embroidered cap, bright green, which his father had worn at his sedra-pušun. The other two had the usual red-and-white striped caps, and all three looked shiningly clean in their new clothes. The headmaster called for the threefold cheer for them-Havoru, Havoru, Havoru, ay šo-boš!t—and then they went to him and the two assistant masters, who heard them recite the appropriate prayers before they helped them tie the košti in the proper manner.5
Each boy as he finished put on his new jacket, glowing with pride and relief at having remembered the texts, and tied the knots correctly; and then the scene became very animated. One of their schoolfellows went round gleefully sprinkling everyone with rose water, while another followed with a mirror which he held before
- See above, p. 234 11. 30.
5 See Pl. VIIa. These lay instructors did not, however, imitate the priests in the manner in which they helped the candidates, for the priests (Parsi and Irani alike) always stand behind the child and guide his hands with theirs (cf. PI.
Vilb).
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
239 each in turn. Then the eldest woman in each family group put sweets between the lips of the teachers and into their hands, and distributed sweets to all the boys. Other women followed them, including old Shirin-e Set Hakemi, bent double as always, and carefully bestowing her small bounty from a little box. The delight of the boys was pleasant to see, and one chubby little three-year-old, the son of Erej Nekdipi, stuffed his small pockets full as well as his mouth. Two of the families also distributed sherbet, and each of the teachers was given a small tray with a green-wrapped sugar-cone in the centre, a ring of white sweetmeats round it, and a handful of lurk and fruits. One family also gave the headmaster an apple with three or four silver coins pressed into it. Then after more cheer ing the boys filed off into the class-rooms, and Piruza the wife of the atašband took the afrinagan in which fire had been burning through out the ceremony, and set off for the fire-temple. The three boys followed her, each carrying one of the silver pots full of greenery, which they laid on the pillar-altar in the hall there. Piruza kindled fire on this pillar, and the boys, facing it, each ‘made new the košti’ again, with grave concentration and only a little fumbling over the knots, while they recited the prayers in their high unbroken voices. This completed the initiation ceremony, and they were then carried off by their families to celebrations at their own homes. A few days later Sarvar’s son Rustam was initiated, with another schoolfellow, and on that occasion Piruza and I joined the family party after wards. Rustam was placed in the seat of honour on a carpet in the pesgam-e mas, and his mother and aunts (come that morning from Hasanabad) gave him presents and sprays of cypress, and kissed him heartily. (After each kiss Rustam rubbed his cheek as vigorously and churlishly as any English schoolboy.) Then there was a cheerful midday meal, the aunts went off to visit Sharifabadi friends, and Rustam slipped away to enjoy bis half-holiday with the other boy.
In the past, poverty and harassment brought it about that sedra pušun among the laity was often by necessity even simpler, the boy merely going alone to the priest, košti in hand, when he was ready; but the priests always invested it with greater solemnity for their own children. So when a few years earlier D. Khodadad’s son Shehriar was initiated, his father asked three of his fellow priests to come from
Yazd for the occasion. That morning Shehriar went through a full threefold cleansing, with pajow, sand, and water, drinking after it an infusion of crushed pomegranate twigs and leaves. About a quarter
240
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES of an hour later he drank nirang, and the priests recited a con fessional on his behalf. Then they celebrated an Afrinagan for the soul of his dead brother Rashid, whose pol-guzār Shehriar was, and another for Shehriar’s own well-being, and then D. Khodadad performed his son’s sedra-pušun.
Essentially a girl’s initiation was exactly the same as a boy’s, but less notice was taken of it in a family, and it made less outward difference to her thereafter, since women did not usually tie the sacred cord at public gatherings, whereas a boy’s initiation set him proudly among the men at all assemblies. Sometimes, therefore, a girl’s initiation was still left till she was nearly fifteen, and she herself felt that she wished to undergo the ceremony. Thus it was that Pourandukht decided to prepare herself for sedra-pušun in the sum mer of 1964, two or three years after she had left the little village school; and almost at the last moment her cousin Parvin (Rashid’s elder sister) decided to join her. They taught themselves the prayers from the Khorda Avesta, with some help from their uncle, D. Khodadad; and it was decided that the ceremony should take place in the Dastur’s House late in July, on the tenth morning of a no šwa there. The two girls made their ablution at home, and arrived looking very pretty in their new clothes, with traditional green head veils, in time to drink nirang with those just finishing their retreat. Then came their families bearing the usual lamps and gifts. A thick cloth was spread on the floor of a pesgam, and a pure white cloth was laid over that. Two trays, bearing the sugar-cones, rose-water, and other things, were set on either side of the cloth, and the Dastur performed the initiations one after the other. Agha Rustam was present, and when the ceremony was over his wife and sister offered Tose-water and sweetmeats to everyone, and gave the green-wrapped sugar-cones to the Dastur. Then after breakfasting with the no swe’s, the two girls carried their pots of greenery to the fire-temple in company with them, and there made their offerings and said their first independent košti-prayers, as the boys had done. Sedra pušun was also performed by women-teachers at the village girls’ school, exactly as at the boys’ one.
It was usually some years before he put on the košti that a boy had that other initiation which he valued, as a youngster, almost as highly, when he became one of the ‘camel’s thora boys’, and was allowed to sleep the night in the mountains, at the shrine of Hrist.
6 See PI. VII.
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
241 This shrine has figured often in the preceding pages, since it was so close to Sharifabad, and had so great a place in the religious life of the village; but it is in fact only one of five great sanctuaries in the mountains which fringe the Yazdi plain. These sanctuaries were very dear to the Zoroastrians, so much so that one explanation which they gave for their seemingly miraculous survival as a community was that they had been spared ‘for the sake of those in the hills’, that is, so that they might continue to worship at these remote places, and to maintain the rites which were proper to them. The five sanctuaries, and one other in the plain near the city of Yazd, were in communal trust. Each village looked after the shrines in its own fields and lanes, but all joined together to care for these six. To visit any of them on any occasion was an act of much merit, but the merit was greatest when one joined in the yearly pilgrimage at the time appointed. Each pilgrimage (generally referred to by the Moslem term hajj) lasted officially for five days, like each of the major festivals, and just before it the guardian of the shrine would visit Yazd and all the Zoroastrian villages in turn, and collect contribu tions for maintaining the sanctuary during the year to come. Money was given, and oil for the sanctuary lamps, and individual gifts were also made by the many pilgrims.
Collectively these shrines were called the great Pirs, and they had a dominant place in the thoughts and affections of the plain-dwelling Zoroastrians. Visiting them was an undertaking of spiritual sig nificance, as well as one of incidental pleasure and delights; and traditionally a pilgrim waited to be called’ by the holy ones. He attended, that is, for some prompting, through a dream or portent, to tell him that he should go. Thus D. Khodadad told me that fifteen years once passed between one pilgrimage which he made to the Pir-e Nareke and the next. Sometimes a special reason would lie behind the prompting which took a worshipper to a shrine. He might have cause, that is, to make an act of thanksgiving, or to fulfil a vow. Sometimes too a wedding was arranged to take place just before the hajj, and the whole bridal party went on pilgrimage together, so that the marriage should begin auspiciously. Conversely, no one went to one of the great Pirs during the first year after a death in the family, when sorrow still clung to him.
The mountain shrines consisted essentially of sacred rocks in high and lonely places, and in going up to them each year the Yazdis appeared to be maintaining an age-old observance which existed
826531X
242
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES long before the establishment of sacred fires, being inherited by Zoroastrianism from pagan times. In the early days of the faith, it seems, there were two main acts of worship required of the in dividual, namely praying daily in the presence of hearth-fire or the sun, and joining in seasonal ascents into the mountains, where sacrifice would be offered to the divine beings. This latter observance was recorded of the Persians by Herodotus in the fifth century B.C., when he wrote:7 ‘It is not their custom to make and set up statues and temples and altars … but … they offer sacrifices on the highest peaks of the mountains. There is no trace of any ancient edifices at the Yazdi mountain shrines, and the Islamic period was probably well advanced before each sacred rock was covered by a small domed mud-brick building, which gave it the conventional appear ance of a humble Moslem imām-zāde, or tomb of a local saint, The Zoroastrians probably first created such buildings in order to gain some recognition of their holy places, and naturally by now no tradition survives of a time when the sacred rocks were open to the sky. The original shrine-buildings were very modest ones, tiny and dark, with thick walls, and either a very low door, or a very narrow one, impassable for the fat, The pilgrims, it seems, slept either in rough shelters nearby, or on the open mountainside, among their tethered donkeys. Then, as conditions became less harsh for the Zoroastrians, more solid mud-brick buildings were put up to shelter man and beast; and later still, as the community flourished, the tiny mud-brick shrines were replaced by larger, more dignified edifices in baked brick and stone, which still looked agreeably modest and unassertive in the vastness of their mountain settings. Further, pious individuals, or villages acting collectively, built pleasant pavilions where pilgrims could stay, sheltered from heat and cold, and these now cluster round the shrines. They again are unostentatious, and in no way isolate pilgrims from the immensity of the mountains, and the sense of awe which this induces.
During the centuries of oppression-as probably in the remoter past also—the mountain shrines were left in solitude between times of pilgrimage, for there were only the sacred rocks there and the humble little buildings over them, nothing that could be stolen or harmed. But when the dignified new shrines were erected it became usual to appoint a guardian or ‘khadem’ to live there all the year round, keeping a lamp lit in the sanctuary by night, and caring for
7 History, i. 131.
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
243 the buildings and for the vessels which were given to the Pir as charitable bequests. This post tended (like most others) to become hereditary, and several families in the region accordingly took the surname of Khadem or Khademi. Up till the 1920s the office could be dangerous as well as lonely, and about a hundred years ago a guardian of Pir-e Sabz was tortured and burnt to death by robbers who thought that he held the secret of hidden treasure; and on other occasions a khadem only saved his life by flight when bandits approached. S
The first of the annual pilgrimages, beginning seventeen days after the spring No Ruz, was to Pir-e Hrišt, the mountain shrine nearest to Sharifabad. Even travelling by traditional means, that is, on foot or donkey-back, the Sharifabadis could reach there in about three hours. The sacrificial animal (a sheep or goat) often rode most of the way, lying comfortably across a saddle. The track from the village went first by fields and orchards, and then out into rough shingle desert. There was a water-tank along the desert stretch, built not long previously to help pilgrims; and after that the track began to climb a little, and at last wound round the foot of a hill, the Kuh-e Surkh, and suddenly the Pir was visible. The shrine was on the crest of a ridge which thrust up from the shingle of a little plain set in an oval of mountains–a sheltered natural arena where once a vast congregation could have gathered on all sides of the sacred sock. The mountain of Hrišt towered up beyond the hill of the shrine, and was a landmark from afar, but the sanctuary at its foot was wholly secluded, and could only be seen after one had entered its arena. Once there, one could oneself see nothing but the shrine, mountains, and the sky.
The sacred rock was a slightly sloping, fissured slab at the highest point of the hill’s crest, an admirable natural altar. The little mud-brick
& Thus when at the turn of the century a notorious robber, Husayo Kaši, led his band to Pire Sabz one year to lie in wait for the pilgrims, the two khadems heard their horses’ hooves (Zoroastrians were not allowed to ride horses) and fled to a cave higher up the mountain. Rumour of danger reached the villages, and Sharifabad sent one Sorush to scout ahead. When he did not return, the pilgrimage was abandoned. The disgruntled thieves left in the end with the shrine Vessels and Soruşh, whom they had captured; but they had not gone far before a quarrel broke out among them, there was a fight, and a number were killed. The survivors attributed the misfortune to having stolen consecrated vessels, so they abandoned these to Sorush and rode away. He buried the vessels in the desert and walked home, and eventually they were all recovered.
9 See above, p. 159.
244
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES chapel first made to enclose it had been rebuilt some twenty years earlier, in baked brick. Because of the position it could not be en larged, but an outer room was added, along the ridge of the hill, and a terrace was created below it on which worshippers could gather.1. A wide brick stairway was made leading up to this terrace, replacing rough steps cut in the rock, and at the foot of the sacred hill there was a cluster of pavilions and two tanks for storing rain water-for Hrišt was the only one of the great Pirs which had no natural spring, and of old pilgrims had to bring all the water they needed on camel-back.
The rites of pilgrimage remained unchanged, regardless of any embellishments of the holy place; and they appeared to be very ancient. An essential part of the hajj was the offering of blood sacrifice. The old orthodox Zoroastrian teaching in this respect is that in the present imperfect world, corrupted as it is by Ahriman, men must kill in order to live themselves; but they must limit the wrong which they thus do to animals by slaying them as mercifully as possible, and always consecrating them first-that is, offering them sacrificially to the divine beings—since by this means only the body is killed, and the creature’s spirit is released to live on and nourish the species. To eat meat other than from a sacrifice–thereby destroying the creature’s spirit—was held to be a grievous sin down to very recent times. In case this practice seems to set Zoroastrianism apart among the great living religions, one should perhaps remind oneself that Islam too practices blood sacrifice, and even in slaughter houses Moslem butchers are required to dedicate the animals to Allah before they are slain. Blood sacrifice is by no means incom patible with a highly ethical faith, and by Zoroastrian doctrine represents indeed a respect for the animal kingdom.’
10 See Pl. VIIIb. For a ground-plan of the enlarged shrine see G. Gropp, *Die rezenten Feuertempel der Zarathustrier (II)’, AMI, N.F. IV, 1971, 283.
11 The Yazdis used the Moslem word, qurban, ‘sacrifice’, for the blood offering, and the simpler people felt no qualms at all about the rite, which to them was a fit and natural expression of devotion; but since the beginning of the century the leaders of their community have been aware of ever-mounting pressures, first from Bombay and then from Tehran, to end the observance. Feeling against it among the Parsis has been intensified by the influences of Hinduism and theosophy, which have led relatively large numbers of them to the mistaken belief that vegetarianism forms part of Zoroastrian orthopraxy. These Parsis accordingly attack blood sacrifice both as cruel and as of Moslem origin. Under this assault the Yazdis were insisting in the 1960s on the charitable aspects of the rite, which (as they truly said) was a khairat, and benefited the poor and deserving.
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
245 The sheep and goats which the Sharifabadis brought to Pir-e Hrišt were in general used to living among people, and accepted all the ritual placidly. They were carefully fed and watered, and usually spent the night comfortably in the corner of a pavilion. Sacrifice was generally offered soon after sunrise, and always before noon, since it had to be made during the first watch of the day, which was under the protection of Mihr. It was usual to adorn the sacrificial beast with coloured ribands or a kerchief (preferably green) tied round its horns or neck. A procession formed, led by musicians. Usually it was tambourines and drums which were played, but sometimes also the surna, with its wild stirring music, fit for a mountain setting. After the musicians came the sacrificial beast, either led or carried shoulder-high up the stairway, followed by a throng of worshippers, who shouted and clapped their hands. 12 The old custom was that the animal was led or carried several times withershins around the sacred rock itself, but with the extended buildings this was no longer possible, and instead it was taken round the pillar altar in the outer room. Those who followed often scattered dried marjoram over both animal and sacrificer, so that man and beast emerged from the shrine sprinkled with little pale-green leaves. Then the animal was brought down the stairway again to a place apart, was consecrated with recital of Avestan, and swiftly slain.13 Formerly this was done by a priest, but by the 1960s the task was of necessity assigned to a respected layman. Hens also were often sacrificed at Pir-e Hrist, and they likewise were carried round the pillar-altar in the outer shrine-room, 14 It was usual for an animal to be dedicated to the shrine long before it was brought there for sac rifice, is and this was sometimes done with hens also. Thus at the Panji gahambar in the house of Tahmina Khanom’s parents there were three half-grown chicks running about, and one with curly feathers had already been dedicated to Pir-e Hrišt four or five years later.
12 See Pl. VIIIa.
13 For the Avesta and ritual see ‘Atas-zöhr …, 109. The contrite kiss on the animal’s cheek was a fixed part of the ritual; and once, before the sheep were taken down the stairway, one for some reason turned back into the shrine, and a man pushed it gently down the steps again and kissed its cheek as he did so,
14 Before the brick terrace was built, in the 1940s, it was the custom to cut the birds’ throats outside the shrine itself, and to toss the fluttering bodies down the steep rocks, to be gathered up below. This site had almost been put an end to, and I saw only one youth perform it on his own.
15 Şee “Mihragān …’, 108.
246
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES The flesh of the sacrificial animal could not be roasted at a mountain shrine, but was seethed (just as Herodotus described) in a cauldron. The custom of Hrist for the Sharifabadis was that only a quarter of the meat need be consumed convivially at the shrine. Another quarter must be given to the poor, and to the ser vants of the community, but the remainder could be taken home for household use, though the devout sometimes gave it all away in an act of supererogation. Naturally a ritual share must be given to a dog, and often Sharifabadis brought dogs along with them, though the guardian of the shrine kept a fine animal of his own. The ceremonial dish of sirog was regularly cooked and taken up to the inner shrine-room, to make boy-o-brang by the sacred rock itself, and such offerings were part of the perquisites of the khadem.
Sacrifice is essentially an act of giving, an offering to the divine beings which is shared with one’s fellows; and the other rites of pilgrimage were variations on ways of giving, both of worship and material offerings. Pilgrims from Sharifabad usually reached the shrine in the afternoon, and as soon as they had unloaded and watered their animals, and settled into one of the pavilions, they climbed up the sacred hill. Containers of water were kept on the terrace, so that all could make the ritual ablutions before they entered the outer shrine-room and said the košti-prayers. Then in a state of purity and grace they passed on into the inner room and the presence of the sacred rock. This room would have been wholly dark but for a lamp set in a niche above the rock, and the many candles which pilgrims lit and put beside it. 16 Some also burnt frank incense and scattered dried marjoram and rue. There was an almost continuous murmur of Avestan there during pilgrimage time, for then both men and women tried to say the five sets of daily prayers, and the devout recited other Avestan texts too, and also monājāt, prayers composed in Persian.
As well as praying in the shrine-room, pilgrims also obeyed the Zoroastrian instinct to worship in the open, especially towards sunset, standing on the ridge of the sacred hill; and sometimes as they did so they cast a handful of grain on the dome of the shrine an act which they explained as an offering to the Pir which also
16 Formerly the candles were put directly on the rock itself. But after a legend was evolved for the shrine (see below, P. 267), a pious person dreamt that the heat of the candles distressed the princess to whom it was held to be devoted, and thereafter the rock was enclosed with a broad metal surrouod, on which the candles were placed.
—–…-
..
….–
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
247 fed the wild birds. (Neat little grey-brown birds, like rock-pipits, came about the shrine, and occasionally a dove.) Women often performed the site of Nakhod-e mošgel-gošay in the shrine-porch, and younger people used to sing and dance in the shrine itself, especially in the evenings, in the same joyous fashion as at the village sanctuaries.
Since Hrišt is so close to Sharifabad, the villagers often went there at other times as well as during the hajj-indeed it was the only mountain shrine whose pavilions had winter quarters, that is, side rooms with doors which could be shut against the cold. There was a regular rite to ensure one’s speedy retum, which was to build a little pillar of stones, when one left, on the side of the Kuh-e Surkh, or to add stones to one of the small cairos there. (Erdeshir Qudusi always made what he called a ‘soul-house’, khāne-ye ravān, with three stones to each of its walls, and a big one for the roof.)17 One especially popular time to visit Hrišt was in the autumn, to give thanks for the harvest which had been gathered in, and by offering sacrifice to help ensure good crops in the coming year; but individuals went then according to the pattern of their own farm-work, and not in a concerted body as at the spring pilgrimage. 18 Since the shrine was so near, many of the villagers still travelled there on donkey-back, rather than by lorry or jeep, and the tethered animals made the nights noisy with their braying. Even without this disturbance, not much sleep was possible during the hajj itself. There was a great holiday feeling then in the air, and a sense that time was wasted spent in sleeping which could better be devoted to prayer or jollity, with all the opportunities which the occasion offered for meeting relatives and friends from other villages. In earlier times there was a great deal of music-making, with stringed instruments and all kinds of pipes and flutes, as well as tambourine and drum; but by 1964 the transistor radio was beginning to encroach on this. Singing and story-telling still went on, however, and the men spent much time playing cards, and occasionally the old Persian game of nard, often sitting up far into the night, while the women, who still had work to do, snatched some sleep. In warm weather many chose to sleep on the roofs of the pavilions, and among the joys of pilgrimage
17 Cf. the funerary usage, above, p. 152.
18 Thus a man often went with his family when he had hung up his plough for the year; but a favoured day was Ruz Mihr of Aban Mah in the traditional calendar, which in 1964 coincided with 12 November. This day was presumably preferred because Mihr Ized was lord of the harvest (see “Mihragān …,113-14).
.
.248
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES were the cool mountain air, the starry skies, and the sense of space and emptiness compared with the close crowding of their village homes.
By day men and youngsters sometimes enjoyed the unfamiliar setting more actively, making expeditions during the long empty hours of late morning or afternoon into the mountains round about. Thus one day Agha Rustam led a little group of us—Shahnaz, Piruza, Gushtasp, myself, and half a dozen eager small boys-up into the Sangāb-e Rustam, a cleft cut through the rocks by storm waters. There had been good rain and snow that winter, and there was still a little stream running down the cleft, with spring flowers yellow and purple and white-along its course, and mint and marjoram to give out their fragrance as we brushed their leaves. There were no fish in the pools, which dried out completely in summer, but an elegant yellow wagtail fitted ahead of us from stone to stone. The air was cool and clear, and Gushtasp, shouting with joy, raised a splendid echo from the mountains above.
Such pleasures were more varied and extensive at the higher, remoter shrines. One of these was, like Hrist, under the care of the Sharifabadi Anjoman, namely Pir-e Bānī-Pärs, the ‘Shrine of the Lady of Pars’. This, perhaps once the greatest of the Yazdi Pirs, was in the mountains at the north-western end of the plain, and its hajj had come to be early in July. The old donkey-track to it struck off the highway to Isfahan a few miles north of Sharifabad, climbed over a low mountain ridge and dropped down into a dry river-bed, strewn with huge boulders. This led up into the higher mountains and eventually to the shrine itself. The journey from Sharifabad to the shrine used to take just over twenty-four hours; and the custom was for the main body of pilgrims from Yazd and the southern villages, led by their priests, to arrive at Sharifabad the day before the hajj, and to sleep there in houses and orchards. Then the whole band would set off together about three hours before dawn, and arrive at the shrine just before dawn on the following day, having spent the midday heat resting in the shade of wild almond and fig trees on the hillsides. In the past it was prudent to travel thus in large groups, to reduce the danger of molestation; and pil grimages were in general a great means of fostering solidarity among the Zoroastrians, with news being exchanged between villages, marriages arranged, and friendships kept in good repair. In the dangerous years the pilgrims were mostly men, with a sprinkling
.
–
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
249 of boys and redoubtable matrons; but sometimes a father would take a favourite small daughter with him, for whom the experience would be an especial wonder and delight. Dogs sensibly joined the cortège in numbers, to enjoy the ritual offerings, and they helped to guard it against thieves and wild beasts; but even so a middle aged woman told me how her father had been in a pilgrim band which was set on by armed robbers on the way to Banu-Pars and stripped of everything-donkeys, bedding, food, and most of their own clothing
All this had become a matter of recollection only. The ways had been made safe under the Pahlavi dynasty, and modern pilgrims to the shrine boarded lorries or ramshackle buses in their own villages, which travelled further north up the highway, entered the dry river bed where it opens on to the plain, and somehow managed to clatter and lurch their way up to the shrine. In doing so they trundled pilgrims past the Stone of the Curse’ (Sang-e la’nat), a big free standing boulder which formerly everyone struck and abused in passing. For there was a legend attached to the shrine of Banu-Pars.19 This runs as follows: when the last Sasanian king of Persia, Yaz degird III, was fleeing with his family from the invading Arabs, his daughter, Banu-Pars, came alone to the head of the Yazdi plain. Here, faint with thirst, she begged for a drink from a peasant. He milked his cow for her, but just as the bowl was full the animal kicked it from his hands, and, the pursuit drawing near, she had to go on with parched throat. She turned into the mountains (the old pilgrim-track is said to follow her steps) and stumbled up the dry river-bed. She begged the ‘Stone of the Curse to open and take her in, but it remained unmoved. She went on further and further into the mountains, and at last, despairing, cried out to Ohrmazd for help, and he opened the rock before her and she hastened in, never to be seen again; but a piece of her dress was caught, it is said, by the closing stone, and old people declared that their grandparents spoke of having seen the fragment of cloth, before the piety of pilgrims wore it away.
This legend closely resembles one attached to the Moslem shrine of Bibi Shahrbānī, the ‘Lady of the Land’, set high on a hillside overlooking the old city of Ray, to the south of Tehran. Only there the Sasanian princess is said to have been married to Husayn, son
19 On this legend and its evolution, see in more detail ‘Bibi Shahrbánū and the Lady of Pārs’.
250
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES of Ali, and to have been taken living into the rock to save her from (Ummayyad troops, pursuing her after Husayn’s death at the battle of Karbala. It has been shown that this shrine at Ray was probably dedicated originally to Anāhīd, the Zoroastrian yazad known to her devotees as ’the Lady’, whose ancient sanctuary was thus consecrated anew for Moslem worshippers, who continue to pray and sacrifice there to this day. The strong probability—one can almost say certainty—is that the ‘Lady of the Pir-e Banu-Pars was also Anahid, and that in course of time the Yazdi Zoroastrians adapted the legend shaped for her northern sanctuary to their own holy place.20 It was a legend which must have held a powerful attraction for them, since it linked their beloved shrine with the last Zoroastrian king of Persia, who, they believed, traced his descent back to Vištasp, the first ruler on earth to have adopted the faith of their prophet. So, they thought, he had divine grace with him; and the tale of his daughter’s sufferings, lonely and exhausted by the pursuit of a pitiless foe, embodied both the community’s sorrow for the fate of their kings, and their own sadness as a persecuted minority, with centuries old memories of massacre, rape, and forced conversion. Moreover, according to the legend Ohrmazd intervened in his mercy to save the princess in the very sight of the heathen Arabs. There was thus faith and hope in the legend also. So although as they approached the shrine pilgrims thought of the fugitive princess, and expressed
able to rejoice in her escape and be merry again, as Zoroastrians should be.
Anahid is a yazad of the waters, and she could have had no more magnificent natural sanctuary than at Banu-Pars. Here the sacred rock is part of an outcrop of stone which forms a platform a few feet above a wide river-bed. Two other river-courses join this one just below the shrine, and though now there is ordinarily only
20 G. Gropp, ‘Die Derbent-Inschriften und das Adur Gušnasp’, Monumentum H.S. Nyberg, i, Leiden, 1975, 321, has challenged this, on the grounds that none of the Zoroastrians whom he questioned knew of an association between the shrine and Anahid. It is likely, however, that the legend associating the sanctuary with the fictive Sasanjan princess was shaped already by the tenth century A.D., a matter of almost 1,000 years ago. The legend was clearly carefully fostered and ardently believed, so it is hardly reasonable to look for memories of an older dedication some thirty-three generations later. The continual popularity in the Yazdi region of the traditional girl’s name Ab-Nahid (Dari Ow-Nair), ‘Anahid of the Waters’, is, however, a stubbom witness to the existence there once of the yazad’s cult.
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
251 a trickle of water in them, still at times of rain and storm a fierce flood, flowing off the high mountains to the south, rushes through the three channels and joias yet a fourth which comes in lower down. A great mountain ridge then blocks their path, and the combined torrent is forced to swing north and churn round this barrier and out on to the plain—thus cutting the river-bed which pilgrims travel up in dry July. Those who have seen the rivers in spate earlier in the year say that both sight and sound are tremen dous; and even in the driest summers there is always water at the shrine itself, for there is an unfailing spring just above the sacred tock, which bubbles up to fill a little pool there. The mountain-ridge which deflects the main torrent lower down shuts off the whole area from the distant plain, and on the hillsides around the sacred rock a great congregation could once have gathered, as at Hrišt; but here they would have gazed down at ceremonies conducted by the waters, instead of upwards at hill and sky.
I first visited Banu-Pars in company with Agha Rustam and a few of his family and friends during the spring holiday of 1964. The guardian of the shrine, Bahram Khademi (who was head master of the Sharifabadi boys’ school), came with us, and so did D. Hormezdyar, a priest who was troubled a little in his mind, and did no regular priestly work, but spent most of the year wandering on foot between the villages and mountain shrines. By a happy mischance our jeep foundered in the river-bed, not far from the ‘Stone of the Curse, and we had to finish our journey on foot, walking up through the thickets of wild almonds, which were in full flower, scenting the air. As we climbed past a flock of foraging goats we came to little terraced cornfields, stone-walled, and showing bright green against the bare hillsides. Then tiny orchards appeared, of apricot and pomegranate and apple trees in bloom, their walls topped with dried thorn-bushes to discourage jackals; and above them on the hillside to the left was the hamlet of Zardju, some twenty houses huddled protectively together. Its įnhabitants, a good looking, kindly people, lived (as one of them put it) ‘hidden from God’, in poverty and isolation, and in their need they had gradually appropriated a handful of tiny fields, the Mazrace Pir, which had once belonged to the shrine. Despite this, they and the Zoroastrians were on good terms, and they welcomed the summer hajj, when they were able to sell a few things to the pilgrims. Bahram Khademi’s mother-in-law lived in Zardju, as his representative, for a month at
252
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES a time (alternately with another elderly woman from Sharifabad), so that she could care for the sanctuary and light its lamp towards sunset each day. (Once it grew dark, she preferred to be back in the hamlet with the warmth of human companionship, for the mountain solitude could seem very menacing.)
The shrine itself was on the right bank, a little higher up than Zardju. The tiny old building, cramped and dark, had not been rebuilt until 1962 (for it was a difficult and costly business to bring men and materials up there for the work). Kai Khosrow-e Yadgar of Sharifabad27 told me that he had made his first pilgrimage to Banu-Pars as a boy in 1914, on the eve of departing for Bombay, and well remembered creeping through a dark passage to the dark little shrine-room, where there was just space for two or three worshippers and a small pillar-altar beside the sacred rock. Since there was more level ground here than at Hrišt, the new shrine was larger, but still modestly proportioned, consisting of a round, domed sanctuary and a rectangular outer hall. A flat table-altar had been set over the sacred rock, but this was raised on three legs, so that pilgrims could still stoop to touch the rock itself and lay their offer ings directly on it, if they wished. Every pilgrim brings some offer ing, large or small, to a mountain Pir, as to a village shrine; and that spring some had plucked sprays of white almond-blossom to place on the rock, together with cypress-twigs brought from the plain; and as they did this they greeted the Pīr devoutly and turned to encourage one another with the salutation ‘May your pilgrimage be accepted!
Men and women alike said the košti-prayers, and other Avestan. Then some walked over to Zardju to greet the villagers, and were in time to see the goats, reunited with their gambolling kids, being penned for the night; and returned as a full moon began to rise, to drink tea, and pray again, and sing in the shrine-room. The evening meal was a merry one, with wine and drinking of toasts, and we all went contentedly to our beds. There were seven pavilions around the sanctuary, but they were meant only for summer use and had no doors; so the men slept in the khadem’s quarters and the rest of us in the hall of the shrine itself, while outside the moonlight poured down and the silence was unbroken.
Later that year, in July, Agha Rustam took us again to the
21 See above, p. 126, and Pl. Ia.
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
253 shrine for the summer hajj, going a day early since it was the Moslem ‘feast of the sacrifice and a national holiday. The heat was then fierce in the plain, and the car-engine boiled twice before we even left the highway, so that it was evening before we crept up the for midable river-bed, The almond trees now bore ripe nuts on their upper branches (lower down they had been stripped by the goats), and the tiny cornfields were reaped and showed bare stubble. We were the first at the shrine, where we settled into the Sharifabadi pavilion, and many insects hastened to join us at our lamp-lit evening meal. There was a friendly glow of oven-fires from Zardju, and later the villagers held a róza-khāni to celebrate their own festival, so many prayers went up from the mountainside that night. Another little group of Sharifabadis arrived in the small hours, having walked from the highway; and soon after sunrise the villagers, looking out from their hillside, raised a shout of welcome to a battered bus which crawled valiantly up to the shrine and disgorged an astonishing number of pilgrims—from Aliabad and Narseabad, Nusratabad and Moriabad—who scattered themselves about the other pavilions. One of these belonged to the priests, who had built it for their own use; but for the first time ever (it was said) no priests came on the hajj that year from Yazd, and only the roving D. Hormezdyar was there to perform their rites for the pilgrims. Nor were there as many of the laity as in previous years, although in the evening of that first day the local jeep arrived packed with pilgrims from Sharifabad and Mazra. Kalantar, and hastened away at once to fetch more, so that our pavilion became full, and the whole place grew animated, with greetings and comings and goings between the shrine and pavilions. Prayer and singing and dancing went on far into the night,
the glorious stars, with nightjars churring as they hawked to and fro for the insects attracted by the lamps.
In the early morning the villagers from Zardju added to the usual pilgrim bustle by coming to sell what little they had-tiny roasted almonds, little baskets woven from almond shoots, firewood, dried herbs, a handful of eggs, some goats’ meat. (At that time of year they had almost no milk from their goats, and lived themselves largely on thin corn-gruel.) One man from Moriabad bought a live goat, and this was offered at the Pir with full ceremony. Formerly the custom was to sacrifice bulls and cows at Banu-Pars, a great offering for im poverished villagers; and it was held that this was done in retribution
826531%
'
‘——
254
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES for the act of the animal which kicked over the milk before the princess could drink it. The cow, was, however, of old the due sacri fice to ‘Anahid of the waters, and so, it seems, the ancient offering was maintained down the centuries at this her former shrine, the legend being adapted to accommodate the ritual. The practice naturally shocked the Parsis when they encountered it in the nine teenth century, for they had learnt a Hindu abhorrence for killing cows; and their agent, Manekji Limji Hataria, persuaded the Yazdis to abandon it. He made no objection, however, to their substituting the usual offerings of sheep and goats, which continued here as at the other shrines.
The next day more pilgrims came by car from Ahrestan and Moriabad, so that there were about a hundred met together in all not many, but enough to make the seven pavilions cheerfully full, The women’s work kept them for hours in the hot kitchens, but for others Banu-Pars offered shade and beauty on every side–so much so that one Tehrani girl (there for the first time with village relatives) declared that she wished she could remain for ever. Round the shrine itself there were big old mulberry trees, and the almonds gave patches of shade everywhere. Until some fifty years earlier there had also been a noble plane tree growing by the pool above the rock, which was much loved and venerated; but a sayyid from Aghda, a notably na-najib town nearby, maliciously had it cut down. (He died before the Zoroastrians could take legal action against him, which they regarded as divine retribution.) So the pool itself was no longer shaded, but was nevertheless much resorted to for its pretti ness and the pleasant sound of running water. From the rocky slopes above the shrine one could see jagged peaks and torn river channels with their huge boulders, and there was the lovely Tutgia valley to explore on the further side of Zardju. Here between almond thickets and wild fig trees one would come on tiny fields walled in with careful labour. Little breezes blew constantly down it, and the air was sweet with the scent of herbs.
In earlier days bold spirits sometimes pressed on to the head of this valley and over the mountains for some ten or twelve miles, until (if they had followed the right track) they came to the Shekaft-e Yazdān, the ‘Cleft of God’. This was entered by a hole high up in a mountainside-itself a steep and frightening climb, D. Khodadad told us. The hole was hardly bigger than a door, but opened into an immense cavern; and at the further end of this was a low passage
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.–.
–
.
-.-
.
-..–. .
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
255 way, out of which a wind always rushed, extinguishing lamps and candles. This passage, he said, was believed to lead down to the cavern where the heroes of the faith lie asleep, waiting for the last battle to be fought at the end of time, and so to go to the cave and pray was a highly meritorious act, and caused all one’s sins to be forgiven (a statement which Agha Rustam promptly and vigorously challenged as fiat superstition).
The battered Aliabadi bus arrived again in the late afternoon of the fourth day, to take its passengers to spend a night at Pir-e Hrišt before they returned home. Somehow they were all loaded in once more, together with a goat and a hen that had been bought to offer at Hrišt. (As the hen’s legs were tied together, Banu-Pars’s name was invoked over her.) While we were waving them off, Pourad nearly trod on a dust-coloured spake, which the men then pursued and killed. Earlier Shehriar, D. Khodadad’s son, had slain a big, crab-like tarantula that emerged from the stone wall by the pool, but in general the insect life, however aggressive, was simply endured.
When the Dastur dasturan lived at Turkabad, at the northern end of the plain, Banu-Pars was probably resorted to more than any other of the great Pirs. It is certainly the only one to be mentioned in the old letters which the Irani priests wrote to their co-religionists in India.22 After the removal of the priests to Yazd, however, it became relatively remote for them, though the fact that they built their own pavilion there shows how firmly it remained in their affections. By the 1960s, however, for a variety of reasons, the most popular pilgrimage of all had come to be to Pir-e Sabz, a dramatically beautiful sanctuary on the other, north-eastern side of the plain, about half-way between Sharifabad and the city. Here the sacred rock is high up on the steep face of a great square-shouldered lime stone mountain, beside a pool of water. This pool is fed by a spring that flows, seemingly miraculously, out of the bare cliff above. The course of the trickling water is green with maidenhair fern, which the Zoroastrians call parr-e syāvušān, and there are fat black fishes in the little pool. This shrine too may well have been dedicated of old to ‘Anahid of the Waters’, and in time a legend came to be attached to it also, which was that another daughter of Yazdegird, called Hayat Banu, the ‘Lady of Life’ (perhaps a cult name of the yazad, Arab icized) was taken here living into the rock, like her sister Banu-Pars.
22 See Riv., Unvala, i. 159.3; Dhabhar, 593.
.
S
“.
-..-
.
.
…
256
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES The maidenhair fern is said to be her hair, and a huge old plane tree which shades the sacred rock is held to have grown from a stick on which she leant, and which she thrust into the ground before vanishing. This tree was believed to catch fire and renew itself, phoenix-like, every thousand years, and its great hollow trunk (which two men could hardly span with outstretched arms) was un doubtedly blackened and burnt. Beside it new stems had sprung up, and with them the tree, still vigorous, formed a lovely curtain of dappled green over the shrine, its long trailing branches hanging down the mountainside to far below its own bole.
There was another beloved tree by the pool, a giant willow which age had bent right over so that trunk and branches spread across the water and down the rocks beyond. When pavilions were being built below the pool, one man decided to remove this willow, and cut away a section of the trunk, some six feet long, from its roots to where it rested on the further edge of the pool; but as he hewed the sap ran out as red as blood, and he stopped his work, and a few months later was dead. No one else dared lay hand to what remained of the tree, and when spring came it brought a seeming miracle, for the huge upper trunk with its many branches, though severed from its roots, put out fresh leaves, and years later it was still beautifully alive, spreading a curtain of interlacing branches under the higher canopy of the plane. The reason must be that the severed section was kept moist by the continual splash of the waterfall, and the tree lived from this moisture; but it is small wonder that it was regarded with awe and reverence, as having been saved by the Pir, There were other trees around the pool which were also venerated; a big myrtle, which grew from the rock-face above, and a younger willow, to whose branches pilgrims tied ribands after making vows, or to ensure a return to the shrine. (At Banu-Pars the ribands were tied to the tali legs of the table-altar over the sacred rock.) There was also a wild fig at the pool, grafted to bear fine fruit, and a rose bush and sweet pomegranates. The third great tree of Pir-e Sabz grew on the edge of one of the terraces. This was a tall slender cypress, some hundred and twenty years old, which raised a noble spear of green against the red-grey rocks behind it.
The sanctuary thus fully merited its name of the ‘Green Shrine’; and its canopy of shade was a special source of wonder and delight in that bare mountain setting, where in summer the limestone rocks baked till they were too hot to touch. Its hajj was in June,
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
257 when the sun was at its height; and Agha Rustam had us at the mountain foot soon after dawn on Zamyad Ruz of Tir Mah, the first day of the pilgrimage. There were many others already at the shrine, and the hubbub of voices came faintly down to us on the valley floor. We paused in traditional fashion to eat something before beginning the climb; and as we sat looking up at the honey comb of terraces and little buildings (for there were seventeen pavilions at this beloved shrine, clinging like some Tibetan monas tery to the rock-face), Agha Rustam was led to reminisce about old times—that is, up to some thirty years earlier, when motor vehicles were still unknown to Yazd. Then it was a full twenty-four hour journey to the shrine for the most southerly villages, and even the Sharifabadis used to travel all through the night. They sent an advance party the night before with donkeys laden with food and bedding; and some of this party would return with the donkeys, and the main band of pilgrims would set off in the cool of the even ing, heading straight across the desert. If the night were dark, the leader of the caravan sometimes played the surna, to keep them together, and occasionally lit a flare-fire along the way. They halted at a water-tank made by one Shehriar, a distant kinsman of Agha Rustam’s, and then pressed on to reach the mountain just before dawn. Some would bring with them white cocks, a living offering which was made only at Pir-e Sabz (together with the usual sacrifice of sheep and goats). Orthodox Zoroastrians would never kill a cock of any colour, since he is the bird of Sroš, who crows to put an end to demon-haunted night and to bring in God’s new day; and white being the Zoroastrian colour, a white cock was especially holy, and the Yazdi custom was to bring such birds (which are not unduly common) to this mountain shrine. There they were kept in a shed near the upper pavilion, and the dawn was full of their crowing. (In Kerman the custom was to take them to the shrine of Shah Varahram Ized, within the city.)
At the shrine the Sharifabadis met pilgrim bands from the other villages, all arriving in orderly fashion on the first day of the hajj. They occupied their own pavilions, and to these they would invite one another in turn in the cool of early evening. Guests were received with formality at a cloth laden with fruit and nuts, wine was offered, and toasts were drunk to benefactors, living and dead. As the party grew livelier, men sang in turns, or played instruments, or told stories. (Women, though present, took no active part.) As the-
258
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES evening wore on, the cloth would be removed, and there would be dancing and mime. Supper was eaten about midnight, and most people went to their beds at one or two in the morning. Not everyone chose to be so convivial, however. One man from Moriabad, for instance, slept early and rose when the last revellers were in bed; and then for two or three hours he would softly play a kamunde, a one-stringed fiddle, in the star-lit darkness, with the trickling of water for accompaniment. Agha Rustam said that he used to lie awake listening to him with delight, until the white cocks began to Crow, and it was time for everyone to rouse themselves to say the dawn prayers. After the noonday prayers it was the custom to take a long siesta in the summer heat, and so the days passed in an orderly mixture of piety and pleasure. There were then (Agha Rustam remarked a shade wistfully) no young children at the hajj to care for and be noisy. However, the donkeys were almost as restless, and with some thousand of them tethered up and down the mountainside and in the stables the braying and fighting were impressive.
On that day in 1964 there were instead a few buses and lorries at the mountain-foot, quiet at least in repose, and some Moslem porters from Ardekan, come to eam a little money by carrying heavy loads up to the shrine. There were one or two jadids among them from Mazras (who had once been seft, I was told, but had repented), and a respectable-looking elderly man who approached Agha Rustam and greeted him courteously, inquiring after his health. It was only later that Agha Rustam told us that this was Sayyid Gulab, who lived in a village nearby, and who as a young man had shot the guardian of the shrine and made off with the sanctuary vessels to sell in Yazd. On the way he was stopped by gendarmes, who seeing the words pir and vaqf on his booty arrested him. The vessels were returned to the shrine, the wounded khadem, one Dadiset from Mazras, spent a month in hospital, and Sayyid Gulab four years in jail, Dadiset himself had died, a centenarian, only a little previously. His other claim to fame was that once during Panji he had climbed the Pir-e Sabz mountain, and had found it nobly flat-topped, a towering giant among the surrounding peaks.
We meantime had only the short, stiff ascent before us to the shrine itself, and it was not long before we reached the fringes of pilgrim activity. A camel bad been hauled up before us to that height, and sat by the path sardonically chewing its cud and causing alarm to townspeople. For this, unlike the gathering at Banu-Pars,
—–..
::
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
259 was a mixed, indeed a cosmopolitan throng, with Zoroastrians from Kerman, Tehran, Abadan, and other Iranian cities, and even one or two Parsis, mingling with the local pilgrims. This diversity caused some shocks to the village girls, who encountered for the first time women who went bare-headed and in short, sleeveless dresses. The boys too had their surprises, and Gushtasp, who had run lightly on ahead, came flying back, wide-eyed, to say that there were bamerds (Moslems) asleep in the Sharifabadi pavilion. When we reached there, however, they proved to be young men from the Tehrani “Sāzmān-e Faröhar’ (a Zoroastrian society), one of whom was dressed from head to foot in black, thus causing Gushtasp’s consternation. The reason why Pir-e Sabz attracted so many seemed to be partly its striking beauty (more immediately impressive than that of the other shrines), partly ease of access; for its mountain rises sharply from the valley floor not far from the main highway to Yazd, and the journey there was by more or less level ways, so that vehicles could be driven with little hazard to the mountain’s foot. The pavilions accordingly were packed, and though this was a source of joy to the pilgrims, as contributing to a worthy act of veneration, there were inevitably minor discomforts, such as queues at the baths (made in the old donkey stables), where travellers sought to make ablution before approaching the Pir, and others at the com munal ovens and cooking places.
Six priests had come to the shrine that year from Yazd, and they occupied their own pavilion, which was just above the Sharifabadi one. They, like the solitary fiddler of old, took no part in the con vivial side of the pilgrimage, but ate their meals separately and in silence, and rose long before dawn to recite Avesta, the steady murmur of their prayers drifting down the mountainside to us through the sound of falling water. When the white cocks began to crow, many of the Jaity rose and contributed their prayers also, standing on the terraces and facing the brightening sky in the east. By day the priests sat for hours on the low terrace outside the shrine itself, above the pool, and there pilgrims sought them out to recite Avestan for them. Often they wanted special prayers against sick ness of misfortune, and while these were being said priest and sufferer would make paivand with a košti. One text much recited then was the Bahram Yašt, potent to bring aid against all evils.
The sanctuary itself is the smallest of the mountain Pirs, and is always dark and cool, for the sacred rock is in a recess beside the
260
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES pool. The round sanctuary, whose small dome almost touches the overhang (blackened by the smoke of centuries) has been rebuilt in brick and lined throughout with tiles, but it could not be ealarged except by a rectangular porch, reached by three high steps. During the hajj animation in and around it went in waves. Sometimes the Pir itself was crowded as well as the terrace outside, and the whole place was full of noise—not only from talk and prayer, but also from flute and drum and the clapping of hands, as a procession came surging up the stairway to the shrine bearing a sacrificial animal, and sometimes meeting another such procession coming joyfully down. Because of the steepness of the hillside the animals were always carried shoulder-high, and I watched one enterprising creature get hold of a mouthful of a woman’s head-veil and nibble it vigorously as it was borne along. Then gradually the milling throng would melt away to the separate pavilions, to eat or sleep, or perhaps hold some ceremony there, and for a while the hubbub died down again almost into silence and mountain peace.
Although Pir-e Sabz was much more thronged than Banu-Pars, the crowd of pilgrims was more or less penned into the tiny oasis of the sanctuary itself, with its cluster of pavilions. There was only one expedition to be made, and that was by a rough track across the mountain face to a narrow, steep-sided valley, poetically named the Bägh-e Golzār Garden of Flowers’. In the spring a stream ran down it and there were indeed flowers, but at the time of the hajj there was only a small reed-fringed pool left at the head of the valley, over hung by a willow and with leeches in it. The haoma plant (an ephedra) grew thickly round about, kept low by browsing sheep and goats, and in June the berries were showing red (rather like yew-berries) on the dark-green bushes. The bushes themselves were so plentiful that they were dried and used for burning, so that the Sharifabadi children hailed the plant as hidma-e hum (‘haoma-firewood’), only the priests making use of it for ritual purposes. Rue and marjoram were also plentiful in the little valley, and were gathered by the villagers for use throughout the year.
Not many pilgrims cared for the hot, rough walk across to the valley, however, most preferring to enjoy the multifarious activities at the shrine itself. Apart from all the usual rites of pilgrimage, there were two bridal parties there that year, and they distributed sherbet and sweets, and exchanged presents between the families, these being carried head-high from one pavilion to the other in gay
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
261 procession, with music and cheering. There was also a sedra-pušun for a girl of about ten from the village of Khorramshah. This took place on a terrace beneath the branches of the ancient willow, with nothing beyond but blue sky and the peaks of distant mountains, The girl, like the priest, was all in white, for Parsi influence in this respect had made itself felt in Yazd and the suburban villages, The simple ceremony attracted the lively interest of a number of Tehranis, some of whom did not wear the košti, and had never seen an in vestiture. Others, who did, sometimes wore the sacred cord in modi fied style. Thus one matron with a commanding air had hers slung like a baldric from one shoulder, over her short dress; and indeed some such modification becomes necessary with European clothes, for neither men nor women can untie and retie the košti with modesty and ease while wearing such garments. The local Zoro astrians seemed courteously tolerant of all such variations of practice, the only matters on which they insisted being that shoes must be left at the door of the sanctuary, and heads covered; and in 1963 a Yazdi established a benefaction whereby a constant supply of clean white kerchiefs was kept in the porch of the Pir, to be used by the bare-headed.
Another modern touch at the pilgrimage was that there were often Moslems about the terraces, from rifle-bearing gendarmes (sent, it seemed, for the Zoroastrians’ own protection) to porters bowed under heavy loads, and vendors of firewood and even of food-sour milk distributed from black leather bags, and joints of goat’s meat; for the Tebranis, disapproving of sacrifice as a part of worship, preferred to buy unconsecrated meat from Moslem butchers, who set up their stalls and slaughtering-places half-way up the mountainside. This trade in necessities was, however, the only commercial element even at Pir-e Sabz, the Zoroastrian shrines remaining blessedly free of the tawdry exploitation which mars the holy places of numerically greater faiths.
The offering of sacrifice was most frequent on the last two days of the hajj; but before then there was a good deal of coming and going by car, and one group of Tehranis was swept off in a ‘pilgrim bus’ which, having brought them to Pir-e Sabz for three days, then took them on to other mountain shrines within the week. The Sharifabadis, however, stayed for the full period of the hajj, and on the afternoon of the last day celebrated a communal gahambar on the terrace beside their pavilion, hanging, it seemed, in sheer space. This was
262 INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES their invariable practice, at Pir-e Sabz as at Hrišt. In the old days they would then have departed together that night on donkey-back, arriving home by the next dawn, and there is a little hollow to the south of Mazra which its villagers call the Tal-e sopra-kašun, the ‘Cloth-spreading valley’, for there the returning pilgrims used to stop to share a last meal at day-break, before separating to go about their ordinary affairs.
In those times of donkey-travel the Sharifabadis and their neigh bours had to journey two days to make their pilgrimage to the southernmost shrines. One of these, Nāreke, is at the foot of a mountain of that name which towers over the broad, flat-floored valley of Gaigun. This runs from north-west to south-east in the mountains at the lower end of the Yazdi plain. For the Zoroastrian villagers to the south of Yazd it was a twelve-mile journey to the shrine. They used to ride their donkeys along the highway to Ker man, and then strike up the barren valley from its lower end, having a long, rough plod up it, but passing two tiny villages where they could get water. The Sharifabadis approached by the more dramatic route down the Pass of Gaigun at the valley’s head. All who had once ridden this way had vivid memories of it, for the pass is so steep that even a pack-donkey had been known to lose its footing and roll abruptly to the bottom. The Sharifabadis reached the pass on the second day of their journey. The first they spent riding down the south-westerly side of the Yazdi plain, through a chain of fertile villages whose green fields and trees they much enjoyed; and by evening they reached the upland village of Taft, on the Yazd Shiraz road. Here they would spend a blissfully cool night in the orchards of co-religionists, who plied them with delicious wine and fruits to supplement their traveller’s fare of hard-bake and goat’s cheese. There is a string of Zoroastrian villages between Taft and Yazd, and pilgrims would come up from there too, and a merry cavalcade would set off at dawn for the formidable pass. In 1964 the Taftis themselves still rode that way on donkey-back to Nareke, just as the Sharifabadis still rode to Hrišt; but by then the northern villagers used to go to Yazd by bus, spend the night at the Zoroastrian rest-house there (built in the 1930s), and travel on the next day up the easier valley route.
From the Pass of Gaigun the old track winds down the valley, across some deep, rocky channels and under a towering wall of mountains; and suddenly there is the Pir, a tiny domed sanctuary
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
263 at the foot of Mount Nareke, which rises as an almost sheer cliff above slopes of scree and fallen rock. At the base of the cliff, still high above the valley floor, there is a deep cleft, shaded by wild fig and pistachio trees, and here a spring of sweet water wells out and sends a stream down the hillside, its course marked by a tangle of water-mint and other plants. As it drops down the hillside it nourishes some fine plane and walnut trees, and fills a stone-lined pool; and eventually it reaches the shrine itself at the mountain foot, and, flowing past it, waters a little patch of fields and a tall cypress tree. There are almost as many pavilions here as at Pir-e Sabz, and it too has a ‘Pavilion of the Priests’; but in Nareke the pavilions (all built this century) climb up the slope above the Pir, clustering especially around the tree-shaded pool, and they can therefore be seen far out across the valley. The shrine itself is hidden by a long low bill of grey-white detritus, sharp-capped and bare of vegetation, which runs parallel with the mountain-wall and makes a secret, sheltered place for the sanctuary. Here many could once have gathered, looking down on the sacred place, which in this respect resembles Banu-Pars.
In the case of Nareke it is difficult to see now why the shrine stands exactly where it does, for if there is living rock there (as seems likely) it has long since been covered by the loose scree which lies everywhere at the mountain’s foot. The first mud-brick shrine building is still standing, with a deep shelf for offerings in the wall nearest to the mountain and sacred spring; but early this century a bigger outer hall was added on to it, and in front of that a building was set which is like a little two-pesgam house, with courtyard and kitchen for ritual cooking. Later a house for the khaden was built against the east side of the sanctuary, so that, with a small garden and yard, there came to be a square group of buildiags forming the shrine complex. In 1950 the shrine itself and the adjoining hall were lined throughout with tiles, and both rooms were fitted with strong metal doors, for the Pir is in a lonely place. Its khadem in 1964 was Bakhtiyar Jarrah of Kuče Buyuk, but he delegated his daily duties to two villagers from the village of Saniabad, which lies on the valley floor, a tiny patch of green, not far from the foot of Nareke. (Be yond it, another such patch, was Tejeng, once famous for its glass making.23) Both villagers were of course Moslems; but one, Ramazan Ali, a simple soul, was convinced that the Pir-e Nareke had saved
23 See above, p. 124.
264
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES his wife’s life when the doctor had despaired of her, and so he tended the sanctuary lamp with grateful devotion. His fellow, Murtaza, was an intelligent man, better versed than many pilgrims in the shrine’s history. One or other fetched the oil for the lamp each month from Bakhtiyar.
In 1964 the hajj of Nareke was in mid August, so that it was the last of the annual pilgrimages according to the reformed calendar, but fell just after the religious No Ruz (Havzoru) by the traditional one. So for those who reckoned by the latter its hajj was the only one at which the noonday prayers were addressed to *Rapatveno, who was held to return above earth on New Year’s Day 24 Although the pilgrimage took place only ten days after Havzoru, nevertheless in 1964 it ‘called’ many pilgrims, and here too the priests were well represented, white-clad in their separate pavilion, and solemnizing many rites. (Blind Palamarz from Sharifabad was also there, and was accepted into their company.) Because it was not so easily reached as Pir-e Sabz, Nareke probably preserved better the atmosphere of the old pilgrimages, with their sense of close-knit community, and their ordered pattern of devotion and delight. The devotional atmosphere was well created on the first evening, when the shrine was full of the sonorous murmur of Avestan, uttered by priests and laity, men and women. A gleaming afrinagan holding fire was set on the pillar-altar, and sent out the odour of incense, while reflecting the light of many candles around the altar’s rim; and other candles shone through the lattice-opening in the inner sanctuary wall. In one part of the room D. Sorush of Taft and Palamarz were reciting tan-dorosti for two women, seated in traditional manner cross legged upon the floor rather than on the tiled bench that ran round the walls; and on these walls, hung there especially for the hajj, were (as was customary) not only bright mirrors, but also photo graphs of notable Zoroastrians of earlier generations, who seemed to gaze down benevolently on their faithful successors. Once outside the shrine again, we found that a bright lamp had been set on its small dome, which shone throughout the night all during the hajj.
If all was piety at the shrine, in the pavilions the atmosphere was one of gaiety and laughter. There was one big pavilion which had been built by a man from Narseabad for the use both of his own village and of the northern ones, and the Sharifabadis found them selves sharing it that year with a betrothal party, nearly fifty strong,
24 See above, p. 50.
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
265 from Narseabad. The largest group was from the groom’s family, he (a young man of about twenty-five) being supported by many kinsmen and friends. His young fiancée, a fourteen-year-old first cousin, was from the village of Nusratabad. There was much dancing and singing in the pavilion, and morning and evening the bride’s mother used to carry an afrinagan with incense round it, to bless all there. (As she approached, Tahmina Khanom would cover the infant Shahvahram with her head-veil, for he had a slight fever, and it was thought that incense, otherwise so beneficial, harmed the sick.) On the third day the bride’s family sacrificed a goat (bought from a Moslem shepherd, who had led his flock to the shrine for the hajj), the bride herself preparing the meat carefully; and on the next day the groom’s family did the same. On both occasions some of the meat was brought as khairat to the Sharifabadis, and Tahmina Khanom, having accepted it, returned the dish filled with sweets and nuts, as was proper. A man and several youngsters from Sani abad came to the pavilion to beg for (and receive) a share of the ‘charity meat’.
Many other sacrifices were offered during the hajj, and the flock of goats, folded at night in the little yard by the shrine, dwindled steadily away. At Nareke the joyful processions wound downward to the sanctuary from the pavilions, along the course of the little stream, and there was altogether more space and ease than on the precipitous slope of Pir-e Sabz. The pleasure of rambling about
Whereas the wild almond was characteristic of the latter sanctuary, Nareke’s tree was the wild pistachio, with its pretty grey-green leaves, the nuts showing a bright reddish-brown among them in August. There were wild figs too, whose tiny fruits were just ripe, to the delight of the boys, who went scrambling about the scree slopes after them. Gushtasp, while doing so, came (to their mutual shock) on a huge dragon-like lizard sunning itself, and brought back a porcupine quill which he had found. The stone-lined pool among the pavilions attracted animal as well as human life, with frogs which croaked by night, and by day flights of tortoiseshell butterflies and a pair of martins. Traditionally, Zoroastrians for some reason regarded the frog as the most Ahrimanic of creatures, which it was highly meritorious to kill, so I watched anxiously one day when Gushtasp caught one; but he simply, boy-like, put it carefully in his pocket and carried it away to release in the stream
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES higher up. (In the same way, the old hostility to corn-stealing ants bad been abandoned in Sharifabad. The Moslem villagers there looked for the nests, destroyed the ants, and took the corn back again; but the Zoroastrians said tolerantly that they could spare the relatively small amounts which the hard-working little creatures garnered. Perhaps their own sufferings had forged a wider kindliness in them towards all forms of life which did not appear deliberately hostile or dangerous.)
On the last night of the hajj, the Taftis rose, according to custom, by starlight, loaded their donkeys, and set off at dawn. Formerly most of the other pilgrims would have gone with them, back up the Pass of Gaigun, to spend another night in the pleasant orchards of Taft. Then many of them—including often the Sharifabadis would travel together down the road to Yazd, to spend the following night at Cham, Erdeshir Qudusi told me that sometimes they were so bemused when they set off at dawn, by drowsiness and the night’s revels, that they slept in the saddle and left it to their wise donkeys to find the way for them. Cham is an old Zoroastrian village, whose fire-temple is built against the trunk of a magnificent cedar, the Sarv-e Cham, which is loved and venerated by all the Yazdi Zoro astrians.25 So to rest here was both pleasant and an act of devotion, and many prayers were said and candles lit under the tree’s spreading branches. D. Khodadad’s father, who owned fields in the village, had built a rest-house for pilgrims, and some used to sleep there, and others in hospitable houses or gardens.
The next day saw the Yazdis and those from the southern villages at their own homes; but the Sharifabadis often went on through the city to pay their devotions to Seti Pir. This is the only one of the great Pirs which is down in the plain, just to the east of Yazd. The area where it stands is called Jangal or the ‘Forest, and probably once tamarisk and other trees grew thickly there; but all trace of them has disappeared, thanks to charcoal-burners, goats, and drought, and the shrine now rises like a little fort out of desert sands, which the wind blows in scalloped ridges against its walls. Inside these walls there is a range of buildings, which include rest-rooms for pilgrims, kitchens, and stabling. Beyond these one passes along a dark stone-floored passage, worn smooth by many feet, to the
25 In the 1920s the great tree was attacked by a swarm of locusts and stripped bare of foliage. It was some time before it recovered, and one of its branches never revived, but remained brown against the green.
267
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES sanctuary itself. The passage slopes downward, for again the holy place is a living rock, which is now far below the level of the shifting sands. The shrine-room has two side-chapels, which has led to the popular etymologizing of the name as the ‘Three Saints’ (Se-tā Pīr). The main room is rectangular, long and narrow, and has at the further, eastern end a broad bench-altar for candles and offerings, over which there is a sort of wide chimney-opening, allowing a glimpse of the sky. This room has a tiled floor, but on entering either of the two dark little side-chapels one steps down on to the solid rock. At the western end of the passage leading to the sanctuary there is a sacred well. 26
What is evidently a late legend attaches to Seti Pir. It is said that this shrine marks the place where Yazdegird’s queen, the mother of the princesses Banu-Pars and Hayat-Banu, herself fleeing from the Arabs, sank exhausted and was taken living into the rock, together with her two attendants. This miracle was revealed in a dream to a Zoroastrian of Yazd, perhaps as late as the nineteenth century; and subsequently others received similar revelations through dreams about the other three shrines which lacked a legend. So Hrišt is now held to be where a married princess vanished, with her child in her arms. Nareke is believed to belong to another wedded princess, and Narestan, in the mountains beyond Seti Pir, is regarded as the shrine of a young prince; but not every Zoroastrian is conversant with these extensions of the legend of Banu-Pars, which was evi dently itself first evolved in Islamic times. It is only since the coming of Islam that it has seemed proper in Iran to link holy places with persons, rather than with divine beings, and the Zoroastrians were evidently only gradually influenced by the dominant religion in this respect, the process being finally completed by the spread of literacy. A ziyāral-nāme, or account of the legend of the shrine, was then duly composed for each place. A framed copy was kept at each sanctuary, and during the hajj pilgrims often read the stories aloud to one another.
The ziyarat-name of Seti Pir relates a curious tradition about the Tevelation of the shrine’s legend. It is said that this Yazdi Zoroastrian made the perilous pilgrimage to the great Moslem shrine of Imam Reza at Meshed (a beloved shrine for Zoroastrians too, because according to the legend of Bibi Shahrbanu the later Shi’i imams had Sasanian blood in their veins). He was recognized there as
26 For a ground-plan of the shrine see G. Gropp, AMI, N.F. iv, 1971, 280.268
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES a non-Moslem and was imprisoned, to be put to death the next day; but as he slept three persons, clad in green and white, appeared to him, told him the story of Seti Pir, and bade him have no fear, but to prepare to make this story known to others. And the next morning, miraculously, he awoke, not in the cell, but safely back in Yazd. Whatever the explanation of the miracle, the story up to then is wholly credible. Thus Agha Rustam’s great-uncle Khodabakhsh also made the pilgrimage to Meshed, but was likewise identified as an uabeliever, and was so savagely assaulted that he died of his wounds.
Seti Pir was thus regarded as the mother of the five great Pirs; and through the year the shrine was in fact visited chiefly by women. Its general hajj, when the fort-like building was packed with people, coincided with the first day of the hajj of Pir-e Sabz, so that Zoro astrians from Yazd and the suburban villages would visit Seti Pir in the early morning, and travel on together in late afternoon to the greater shrine. At other times the sanctuary was often locked and empty, but any Zoroastrians who wanted to visit it could get the keys in Yazd or Moriabad, close by,
In the past the Sharifabadis themselves, having visited Seti Pir, sometimes went on to pay their devotions to the Pir-e Narestan, before starting on their slow thirty-mile journey homeward although the hajj of Narestan was properly in June, soon after that of Pir-e Sabz. In the 1960s Narestan, though very lovely, was some what neglected in comparison with the other great shrines. The sanctuary is set in the Kharuna mountains to the east of Yazd, a bare harsh range which supports no villages; and, though it is only some six miles from Yazd, these miles had become difficult ones, and were forbidding to motor vehicles. The first stretch was across treacherous sand desert, where sometimes the track, rough at the best of times, disappeared under shifting dunes. Then it climbed painfully up a valley with a dry river-bed, crossing it from side to side. At the head of this valley the track stopped, and only a donkey path went on through a narrow winding gorge, so overhung by rocks that even in June there were still some small pools of water there. Then suddenly the green spire of a cypress showed ahead, and a bend in the defile brought one out into what seemed like a demi paradise—an enchanting bowl-shaped valley, ringed by formidable mountain peaks, but itself green and welcoming. There was a pretty patchwork of tiny fields, a scattering of pomegranate and mulberry trees, and near the cypress a thicket of roses, still flowering at that
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES
26: height in June. At the head of the valley (which was just fertile enough to support a single family) there were graceful aspen trees, and a group of young pines had been planted below the sanctuary, though these were flagging because of drought.
The sacred place itself consisted of a shallow cave, about twenty feet high at the entrance, but with sharply sloping roof, so that it ran back only about nine feet into the mountain. At the back there was a fissure from which water flowed out across a flat rock at the cave-mouth, to fill a pool below. This pool was overhung by three myrtles, their branches so entwined that they looked like one tree; and in June they, like the roses, were in full bloom, their white, scented flowers loud with bees. Once many people, spread out below, could have witnessed rites performed at the sacred rock above the pool, until the usual mud-brick shrine was built over it. In 1941 this was incorporated in a bigger building, which was unusually long and tall, because of the shape of the site. This building wholly screened the cave-mouth from distant view, but one could pass round it to the cave itself, where a little platform had been built on which pilgrims could lay their offerings of candles, incense, sirog, or the like. The shrine-buildings contained the usual pillar altar, and also enclosed the trunks of the three myrtles, whose branches passed out into the sunlight through a brick lattice-work on that side; and anyone wishing to circumambulate the pillar altar had to stoop under the arching trunk of the biggest tree. The stems of the myrtles inside the shrine, like the willow at Pir-e Sabz, were adomed with strips of cloth and ribands, tied round them by devotees,
Narestan was the most enclosed and solitary of all the sanctuaries, and its pilgrimage had special rigours in modern times. Since there were no friendly villagers nearby with things to sell, and no wander ing shepherds with their flocks, the pilgrims had to bring everything they needed with them and carry it all through the rocky defile and up the little valley. This had been less of a hardship in the days of donkey-travel than now, when vehicles had to be abandoned in the dry river-bed. Further, at the turn of the century the shrine-fields were seized by an unscrupulous sayyid, who harassed the Zoroast rians greatly; and the Moslem family which worked them for his descendants had little regard for the shrine. Yet despite these dis advantages, Narestan continued to call the faithful, and half a dozen pavilions had been erected there, two fairly recently, at the
270
INITIATIONS AND PILGRIMAGES head of the valley near the shrine. Naturally it was Zoroastrians from Moriabad and the other villages to the south-east of Yazd, and Yazdis themselves, who visited this sanctuary most often; and when they had performed the rites of pilgrimage, they could sit in these pavilions, looking out over the green valley and frowning peaks, and sleep to the sounds of wind soughing through the little pines, and the rustle of aspen leaves. Among the huge tumbled rocks at the head of the valley was a little cave devoted to Mihr Ized, and at the time of the hajj pilgrims, especially women, would climb up to this, and light candles there and pray.
It was perhaps at the mountain shrines that one was made most sharply aware of the ancientness of Zoroastrianism, and the close ness of the links between its worship and the physical world, Ohr mazd being venerated here with archaic rites in the temple of his own creation. The gulf was also demonstrated (especially at Pir-e Sabz) between traditional Zoroastrianism and the religion which the urban reformists were striving to evolve. Some of the young people who came from Tehran were deeply serious in their attachment to their ancestral faith, but they shrank from the blood sacrifices, the singing and dancing in the shrines, and the general robustness of the old and to them alien ways. They were in search, not only of a devotional experience, but also of some philosophy or mysticism, and found little sustenance in the traditional beliefs and usages; and these, it was plain, could not survive unmodified much longer even in the rural communities, where modernizing influences were pressing in ever more urgently. The Sharifabadis and their neigh bours on the Yazdi plain have been the staunchest upholders of the ways of their forefathers, despite both oppression and persuasion; and through their steadfastness they have preserved much of the ancient practices and beliefs of Zoroastrianism, before this venerable faith has everywhere to come to closer terms with the contemporary world.