An Ancient Image, a Modern Identity

The popular moralised reading, the three rows of wing feathers as good thoughts, good words and good deeds, the ring as loyalty or the eternal soul, the forward-facing figure as the choice of righteousness, is a modern didactic interpretation developed largely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not a doctrine found in the Avesta. Its use as a badge worn on the body is itself recent: the Faravahar was scarcely used as jewellery or insignia before the twentieth century, when Reza Shah's Pahlavi dynasty, seeking pre-Islamic symbols to anchor a modern Iranian national identity, promoted it alongside other Achaemenid imagery in state architecture and publications from the 1920s onward, a secularising, nationalist adoption distinct from its earlier purely religious currency and from any single Zoroastrian doctrine. That association proved durable: the Faravahar remained visible in public life even after the 1979 revolution replaced the monarchy that had promoted it, and it is worn today both by Zoroastrians, a small and largely diasporic community, and by many non-Zoroastrian Iranians as a marker of pre-Islamic heritage, a double use that keeps the ancient royal image and the living minority faith bound together in a single modern symbol.