I have a few personal connections with Zoroastrianism. To begin with, there was a guy in my high school, I will call him Vladimir, who sent me long, intricate letters in tiny handwriting after I graduated. He was a very intellectual person who ended up teaching ancient religions at Princeton.
It took me months to realize that Vladimir was in love with me. Years later, I visited him in his apartment in Queens, and noticed he had a burner on the stove lit, with no pot on it.
“Why is that burner on?” I idly asked.
“I am a Zoroastrian,” Vladimir explained. “We worship fire.”
I had a feeling he wasn’t kidding.
In 1987, I visited India for the first time. I flew from Athens to Mumbai and bought a train ticket to Calcutta for the next day. This was my first night in India!
I walked around my neighborhood. I’d found a surreal hotel near the train station with twelve beds in one room – and discovered that I was in a Zoroastrian community. I passed a temple with statues of winged lions with human faces guarding the entrance. It was like the set of an Indiana Jones movie.
There are currently 47,000 Parsis – Indian Zoroastrians – in Mumbai.
When the editor of Hudson Valley One asked me to write about holidays, I immediately suggested Zoroastrian solstice observance.
Friedrich Nietzsche shared my fascination with Zoroastrianism, and wrote a whole book “channeling” Zoroaster, its founder. Here is a free excerpt from Thus Spake Zarathustra:
“Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye dancers, and better still if ye stand upon your heads!”
“Zarathustra” is the original, untranslated name of Zoroaster. But did the Zoroastrians actually celebrate a winter holiday? I went online and discovered … the Zoroastrians invented Christmas!
First of all, what’s Zoroastrianism? It’s an ancient monotheist religion – perhaps the oldest – originating in Iran around the seventh century B.C. Its mysterious prophet, who gave his name to the religion, wrote 17 hymns known as the Gathas which function as scriptures.
The holiday Christians celebrate on December 25, of course, is not in the bible. And there is zero evidence that Jesus’ birth took place in winter. In fact, it’s quite likely Jesus was born in the spring – the same season in which he died – because the Gospel of Luke recounts: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” while Jesus was born. Shepherds stay up all night during lambing season, in springtime, to keep an eye on birthing sheep.”
Early Protestants hated Christmas, denouncing it as a pagan feast. In Boston, its celebration was outlawed.
And for good reason! According to an essay by Cyrus Kar:
Before it was Christmas, December 25th marked the celebration of Yule, a contraction of the ancient Iranian word Yalda. That’s because classical Romans, Celts, Sachs and Saxons had adopted the pagan religion of their ancient Iranian ancestors, known as ‘Mithraism’…
Another researcher, Keli Shroff, writes: “… It is interesting to note that the three wise men, the Magi, who heralded the birth of Christ, were Zoroastrians.”
Frankincense and myrrh, which the Magi brought, are used in Zoroastrian temples around the globe.
The Christmas tree is also Iranian in origin: In ancient Persia, Yalda festivities were symbolized by the evergreen tree. Young girls wrapped their wishes in silk cloth and hung them on the tree.
Eventually, it became a custom to place gifts under the evergreen tree.
As late as the 18th century, a German learnt of the Yalda tree and created what we now know as the Christmas tree.
Of course, all winter celebrations derive from the astronomical fact that December 21 is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Each subsequent day is longer until the summer solstice. The “light” has returned, which in Mithraism signified the birthday of Mithras, a god of the rising sun, contracts, friendship and war.
This information comes from the World Zoroastrian Organization website. But does the rest of the world accept this theory?
Well, a little. The December 25 holiday seems to be an attempt by early Christians to coopt both Mithraism, which was a semi-secret “mystery cult” often celebrated in underground tunnels, and the Saturnalia, a much more popular Roman holiday lasting from December 17 to December 23, with lots of partying, banqueting, drinking, gift-giving, and equality between masters and slaves – plus a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica hasn’t heard of the Yalda theory of the Yule celebration, but admits that Yule’s roots “are complicated and difficult to trace.” One of the first mentions of the holiday is by the Venerable Bede, who documents it among the Norse and Anglo-Saxons in the early eighth century. (Whenever possible, I like to mention St. Bede the Venerable, who died in Jarrow, England in 735 – but had to wait another 1164 years to be canonized!)
The Christmas tree did originate among German Protestants in the 16th century, but no one knows exactly why. Legend has it that Martin Luther himself was the first to add candles to the tree.
As for the Magi, Wikipedia tells us the word magi is the plural of Latin magus … derived from Old Persian maguŝ, .i.e., the religious caste into which Zoroaster was born. The term refers to the Persian priestly caste of Zoroastrianism.
So maybe the followers of Zoroaster are right, and we should all wish each other “Merry Yalda” throughout late December!
Join the family! 
