Barashnum

Zoroastrian purity is a physical matter with a moral basis. Pollution is understood as the work of the hostile spirit, present in the world as decay and above all in the corpse, so contact with death requires more than washing. The barashnum answers that requirement with a graded sequence. The candidate is led through a prepared ground marked out with stone seats and furrows and is washed three times: first with nirang, consecrated bull's urine, then with dry dust, then with water, each applied in a set order over the whole body while an attending priest recites the appropriate formulae.

The three substances are not interchangeable. Mary Boyce's account in her history of Zoroastrianism sets out the reasoning, which is that a liquid alone would carry the pollution into the water it touched, an offence in its own right, so the corrupting matter must first be absorbed and then dried before water is used at all. After the washing come nine nights apart, spent in a designated place, in which the person keeps clear of any contact that would restart the process, with further ablutions at intervals. The rite ends in a state that qualifies the person for what follows. This entry sets out the structure of the rite and is not an instruction for performing it.

The barashnum was once a requirement rather than a specialism. Texts preserved from the Sasanian period and later treat it as the remedy for grave pollution and expect lay people to undergo it, and the ritual apparatus assumed by the Vendidad is that of a community in which such purifications are ordinary. That is not the modern picture. Among the Parsis of India the rite survives principally as a stage in the making of a priest, undergone before ordination, and it is administered at a small number of institutions equipped for it.

In Iran it has largely lapsed. The reasons are ordinary ones: the rite is long, it requires specialists and a prepared space, one of its materials is difficult to obtain and use in an urban setting, and the underlying purity rules have themselves been argued over within the communities. Zoroastrian reformers from the nineteenth century onward questioned whether such observances belonged to the religion's core or were an accretion, and traditionalists answered that the purity laws are integral to it. That argument is live. The atlas therefore records the historical practice as attested and its present extent as contracted, without treating either the reformist or the traditionalist reading as settled.