The body of revelation given to Zarathushtra and preserved in Avestan, a tongue so old it died as a spoken language before the Achaemenids and survived only as liturgy — memorised, syllable for syllable, for a hundred generations. The texts below are given in scholarly transliteration of the Avestan, the authoritative reading; the script above each is the sacred Din Dabireh hand.
These are spells in the oldest sense — sound the prophet himself called weapons against the Lie. The Order opens and closes every gathering with them.
Ahuna Vairya · “Yaθā Ahū Vairyō” — the seed-mantra of creation, holiest of all
𐬫𐬀𐬚𐬁 𐬀𐬵𐬏 𐬬𐬀𐬌𐬭𐬌𐬌𐬋
yaθā ahū vairiiō · aθā ratuš aṣ̌āt̰cīt̰ hacā
vaŋhə̄uš dazdā manaŋhō · š́iiaoθananąm aŋhə̄uš mazdāi
xšaθrəmcā ahurāi.ā · yim drigubiiō dadat̰ vāstārəm
“As the Lord is to be chosen, so is the Judge, by reason of Asha. The gift of Good Mind is for the deeds done for Mazda in this world; and power is given to Ahura, whom men set as shepherd to the poor.”
Ashem Vohu — the praise of Righteousness
𐬀𐬴𐬆𐬨 𐬬𐬊𐬵𐬏 𐬬𐬀𐬵𐬌𐬱𐬙𐬆𐬨 𐬀𐬵𐬙𐬍ašəm vohū vahištəm astī · uštā astī uštā ahmāi · hyaṯ ašāi vahištāi ašəm
“Righteousness is the best of all good. It is radiance. Radiance to the one who is righteous for the sake of the highest Righteousness.”
Yeŋ́hē Hātąm — the praise of all good beings, women and men
𐬫𐬉𐬢𐬵𐬉 𐬵𐬁𐬙𐬃𐬨
yeŋ́hē hātąm āaṯ yesnē paitī vaŋhō · mazdā̊ ahurō vaēθā aṣ̌āṯ hacā
yāŋhąmcā tąscā tā̊scā yazamaide
“Those beings, of all that are, whose worship Ahura Mazda knows to be best through Asha — those, the men and the women, do we revere.”
The Fravarānē — the Declaration of Faith, by which one becomes Mazdayasna
frauuarānē mazdaiiasnō zaraθuštriš vīdaēuuō ahura.t̰kaēšō …
astūtascā fra.uuarətascā · astuiiē humatəm manō · astuiiē hūxtəm vacō · astuiiē huuarštəm š́iiaoθanəm
“I profess myself a worshipper of Mazda, a follower of Zarathushtra, opposed to the daēvas, holding the Lord’s doctrine — I praise and I choose the Good Thought, I praise and choose the Good Word, I praise and choose the Good Deed.”
Seventeen hymns within the Yasna, composed by Zarathushtra himself in metres older than Homer. Here he stands at the beginning of the world and asks the questions the Order still asks.
Folio 175 of one of the oldest surviving books of the Avesta — copied in 1323 of the Common Era by the scribe Mihrabān Kaykhusraw, and opened at the very verse transliterated below: Yasna 28.1, the first breath of the Gāθās. Every letter of this hand was devised to fix a single sound the priests had carried in the mouth, unbroken, for two thousand years before a reed was ever set to the page.
Yasna 28.1 — the first words of the Gathas, the verse on the folio above
ahiiā yāsā nəmaŋhā ustānazastō rafəδrahiiā
maniiə̄uš mazdā pouruuīm spəṇtahiiā aṣ̌ā vīspə̄ṇg š́iiaoθanā
vaŋhə̄uš xratūm manaŋhō yā xšnəuuīšā gə̄ušcā uruuānəm
“With hands outstretched in reverence I beseech you, Mazda — first of all, the support of your Bounteous Spirit; that I may act through Asha in all things, and gain the wisdom of the Good Mind, and so content the Soul of Creation.”
Yasna 30.3 — the two primal spirits, the root of our ethics
at̰ tā maniiū pauruuiiē yā yə̄mā xvafənā asruuātəm
manahicā vacahicā š́iiaoθanōi hī vahiiō akəmcā …
aṯcā hudā̊ŋhō ərəš vīšiiātā nōiṯ duždā̊ŋhō
“In the beginning the two Spirits, the twins, made themselves known — the Better and the Bad, in thought, in word, in deed. Between them the wise chose rightly; the foolish did not.”
The Avesta is not one book but two languages, separated by perhaps a thousand years — as Chaucer's English stands from our own, but wider still. Both are called Avestan; only the older was ever truly spoken by those who shaped it.
The archaic core: the seventeen Gāθās, the prose Yasna Haptaŋhāiti (“the Worship of Seven Chapters”), and the four great manthras. Its grammar is the twin of Vedic Sanskrit, set in the second millennium before our era — the unmediated speech of Zarathushtra and his first circle.
The vast remainder — the Yašts, the Vendidad, most of the Yasna, the Visperad, the Khordeh Avesta — composed over the centuries that followed, when the old tongue was already a sacred language learned by priests rather than spoken in the street. Around the ancient core the whole edifice of worship was raised.
So old is the Gathic layer that its priests preserved sounds they no longer understood — and in that fidelity, unwitting, they kept the words exact.
What survives is a fragment — perhaps a quarter of the corpus burned in the conquests. The Order guards what remains.
The 72 chapters of the chief liturgy, recited over the sacred haoma. At its heart sit the Gāθās. The 72 threads of the kushti cord we wear are counted from it.
“All the Patrons” — supplements to the Yasna for the high seasonal feasts, the Gāhānbārs.
Twenty-one hymns to the Yazatas — Mithra, Anāhitā, Tištrya, Vərəθraγna. The oldest mythology of Iran is here.
Vī-daēvō-dāta, “the law against the demons” — purity, contagion, and the war on pollution, recited only in the deep of night.
The “Little Avesta” — the book of daily prayer carried by every layperson: the Niyāyišns and the five Gāhs of the day.
Of the original twenty-one Nasks, only one — the long Videvdad — survives entire; the rest are known now by their names and digests in the Pahlavi books alone. We mourn them at every fire.
No Zoroastrian read the Avesta for most of its life. It was recited — held in the trained memory of the priesthood and passed mouth to ear across a hundred generations, for a written scripture was thought less holy than a living one.
For more than a thousand years the corpus existed only as sound. A mōbed learned it by heart in the priestly schools, each accent and pause a discipline; to misspeak a manthra was to blunt its edge against the Lie.
Only under the Sasanians, around the sixth century CE, did the priests forge a script equal to the task — the Din Dabireh, “the religion-writing,” of some fifty-three letters built to catch every vowel and breath the older scripts had blurred. It is the hand you see across this page.
When the temples and their libraries fell in the seventh century, the written Great Avesta was scattered and burned. What endured was the liturgy the priests still carried by heart — saved because it was sung, not because it was shelved.
Before the Word was ever written it was already stamped in metal. On the coinage of Iran the fire-altar became the face of the faith — the one emblem a king could press into every hand in his realm.
Struck by the Frataraka — priest-kings who ruled the Persian homeland after Alexander — this silver shows the lord standing in worship before a fire-temple and standard, a winged figure hovering above. It is among the earliest images of Zoroastrian worship ever set on money.
For four centuries the Sasanian drachm carried one unchanging reverse: the sacred fire blazing on its altar, flanked by two attendant priests. The fire of the realm, the ātaš itself, had become the seal of the state — Mazdā-worship made into coin of the realm.
Beside the sacred Avestan hand there is the royal script — Old Persian cuneiform, devised under Darius the Great to carve the will of kings into living rock. It is a simple syllabary of thirty-six signs, read left to right, each word closed by a slanting wedge. Where Avestan whispers the liturgy, cuneiform proclaims the empire.
High on a cliff in Kermanshah, Darius cut his victory in three tongues — Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian — the trilingual key that unlocked cuneiform for the modern world.
DNa, the tomb of Darius the Great at Naqsh-e Rostam (c. 490 BCE) — §1, the royal confession of Ahura Mazda
𐎲𐎥 𐏐 𐎺𐏀𐎼𐎣 𐏐 𐎠𐎢𐎼𐎶𐏀𐎭𐎠 𐏐 𐏃𐎹 𐏐 𐎡𐎶𐎠𐎶 𐏐 𐎲𐎢𐎷𐎡𐎶 𐏐 𐎠𐎭𐎠 𐏐 𐏃𐎹 𐏐 𐎠𐎺𐎶 𐏐 𐎠𐎿𐎶𐎠𐎴𐎶 𐏐 𐎠𐎭𐎠 𐏐 𐏃𐎹 𐏐 𐎶𐎼𐎫𐎡𐎹𐎶 𐏐 𐎠𐎭𐎠 𐏐 𐏃𐎹 𐏐 𐏁𐎡𐎹𐎠𐎫𐎡𐎶 𐏐 𐎠𐎭𐎠 𐏐 𐎶𐎼𐎫𐎡𐎹𐏃𐎹𐎠 𐏐 𐏃𐎹 𐏐 𐎭𐎠𐎼𐎹𐎺𐎢𐎶 𐏐 𐎧𐏁𐎠𐎹𐎰𐎡𐎹𐎶 𐏐 𐎠𐎤𐎢𐎴𐎢𐏁
baga vazraka Auramazdā — hya imām būmim adā — hya avam asmānam adā — hya martiyam adā — hya šiyātim adā martiyahyā — hya Dārayavaum xšāyaθiyam akunauš
“A great god is Ahura Mazda, who created this earth, who created yonder sky, who created mankind, who created happiness for mankind, who made Darius king.”
Switch the tongue, top-right, to 𐎠𐎼 and the whole Order speaks in this royal hand.