 It's a very special evening tonight. A very warm welcome to all of you. Thank you very much for coming to have this evening with us and celebrate the first officially invited lecture we host at the Chaporgy Palongy Institute. It gives me a huge pleasure to introduce our first speaker tonight on this event, Professor Philip Cranebrooke, who is by no means new to Sowers. In fact, Professor Cranebrooke is an alumnus of Sowers. After doing his first and second degrees at the University of Amsterdam and Ytricht, Professor Cranebrooke came to Sowers to do a postgraduate degree in Zorastianism, Old and Middle Iranian Languages and Ingujarati. I assume you studied here with some of our great people at Sowers, Professor Mary Boyce of course and Professor Nicholas Sims-Williams and other colleagues. Professor MacKenzie, of course Nicholas was so young. He was here at Sowers and studied Iranian studies. Then he took up a lectureship at the University of Ytricht while completing a PhD at the University of Leiden. He was awarded his PhD in 1982. Between 1988 and 1996 Philip was then Senior Lecturer in Modern Iranian Languages. Between 1988 and 1996 you were Senior Lecturer in Modern Iranian Languages here at Sowers. Then you were invited to take up a chair in Iranian studies at the University of Göttingen from which you retired in 2017. Professor Cranebrooke's wide-ranging research covers the areas of Zorastianism, of Yezidism, of minorities' religions among the Kurds, oral literatures and culture, ancient Iranian literature and memory in Iranian cultures. Of course it's impossible in this short introduction to do full justice to the breadth and the depth of his work, but I would just like to highlight two particular areas in which he has made huge contributions. One is Zorastianism and the other one is Kurdish religion and Yezidism. Professor Cranebrooke established himself as an authority in Zorastian studies with a study of Srausia in the Zoroastrian tradition, a book published in 1985. The core text of this deity has survived to the present day in our western and Middle Persian versions and Professor Cranebrooke has provided a pioneering edition translation commentary of both of these versions and a very detailed study of the figure of Srausia. Another of Professor Cranebrooke's key contributions to scholarship is his collaborative work with a high priestess, Dr. Feroz Kojwal, on the priestly treatises in Herbatistan and Nyrangistan. Professor Cranebrooke published, together with Feroz Kojwal, a seminal work in four volumes between 1992 and 2009, making a very poorly transmitted text and difficult text in our western and Pachlawi available to an academic and non-academic readership. This was actually the first publication, visit translation of the Pachlawi version of this text. Professor Cranebrooke's collaboration with members of the Zoroastian community has continued and in particular he worked with Shenaz Munshi on the living traditions of the Zoroastians in India and in this work he was crucially supported also by my colleague Dr. Sarah Stewart. This work led to the publication of a book entitled Living Zoroastianisms. Living Zoroastianism, urban parties speak about their religious lives and, as it happens, we have an exhibition on, at Zoroastia, at the moment with exactly this title. This title occurred to me after I thought of that title. There is this book by Professor Cranebrooke with exactly this title and Professor Cranebrooke has very graciously had no objection of us using this same title for the exhibition, which is currently on show. You will all have the opportunity to see it after our proceedings have come to a conclusion here as we will all go next door to the Brunai Gallery for a reception and you can venture into the exhibition room, which is just next to it, next to the reception. Now, this work on Living Zoroastianism by Professor Cranebrooke and supported by Shenaz Munshi describes the reality of modern Parsi religions through 30 interviews. In these interviews, Parsi's speak and Parsi's who belong to different social milios and religious schools of thought and they discuss various aspects of their religious lives. Here we get an amazing glimpse of Zoroastian thought in the contemporary community. Another area of Professor Cranebrooke's research is the religion of the Kurdish people, Yazidism in particular. The fruit of this work is his monograph on Yazidism, its background, observances and textual tradition published in 1995 and is only one of his many outputs on the religion of the Yazidis. This particular volume is based on Professor Cranebrooke's own field work with the Yazidi community in northern Iraq and it includes texts and translations of 19 Yazidi hymns with a commentary on points of theological and theological interest and this is the first ever publication of these materials which up to then had been living only in their oral traditions. Professor Cranebrooke's work combines work on the written and on the spoken word. He is a great expert in both of them and tonight he will speak to us on Zoroastian studies and the question of orality. Please welcome Professor Cranebrooke. Thank you very much Professor Hintzer for those very kind words. Ladies and gentlemen, first may I say how delighted I am to be here as the guest of the new SOA Shapur Jepalungi Institute for Zoroastian Studies. Until recently we could only hope and dream that something like the donation that gave rise to this institute would ever happen. And now the future of the study of Zoroastianism is ensured which is an enormous relief for most of us. Now to come to the subject of tonight Zoroastian studies and the question of orality, the fact that most Zoroastian texts have been transmitted orally for many centuries is now theoretically recognised by most scholars but the implications of that haven't always been truly taken into account by some while others are looking for prescriptive general rules ruling oral literature in order to understand the workings of oral transmission whilst most specialists on comparative oral literature are agreed that no such general rules exist. Many scholars of Zoroastianism therefore are not sure how to deal with orality. As a colleague of mine once said, if we all went your way we'd have nothing left to study with some, you know, was a bit worried about it and what I'd like to do this evening is to convince you that that's far from the truth and that ancient Zoroastian studies can benefit very much for modern insights and approaches such as oral studies in itself and discourse analysis. To achieve that we will always need philology as a key element of our study but we should also keep in mind that the texts we have are merely expressions of a much wider and more complex Zoroastian discourse than the ages of which we can only catch the occasional glimpse. Now first of all I'd like to introduce these two methodological approaches I was talking about and the implications of their insights for Zoroastian studies. Then I would like to discuss the history of the transmission of some Zoroastian texts as I imagine it, taking into account the available mechanisms for transmitting oral texts. You can't do that as you can do it when you've got books. After that we can briefly discuss the way these texts were memorised and therefore conceptualised by ancient Zoroastian priests and then we can bridge the question as to to what extent we can gauge the history of an oral text. Normally an oral text develops and you can't just say very much but the question is can we do something in the case of Zoroastianism and that because it's about Zoroastianism will bring us to the role of Zaratustra, the beginnings of Zoroastianism and I will end by proposing an imagined way, a way that the Gathas can be understood in the light of a number of these findings. Now first, discourse analysis. I'm not going to go deeply into the various ways in which a lot of people now define and practice discourse analysis. DA is a philosophy that involves studying the way a certain phenomenon is spoken of and therefore made intelligible in a given culture over a certain amount of time. DA itself is a philosophy, not a methodology, but has given rise to some methodological approaches that can be helpful for Zoroastian studies. What's most relevant here is that discourse analysis imagines every utterance, even what I'm saying now, as the result of a long and brewed series of similar utterances, part of which have taken place here at SOAS, and the context in which they took place. If there had been such history, what I was saying would be incomprehensible. And everything one says, according to discourse analysis, adds to the discourse. Nothing one says is neutral. According to Foucault, who's a central figure in this field, the developments that such long and broad streams of discourse undergoes are governed by a set of rules, which are perhaps parameters. Premises of which the speaker may not be aware, but which determine what he can and cannot say about a certain subject. Foucault then says that these rules are generally determined by power, and he may be right, he's very much into power, which I'm not. Written words are seen as manifestations of the discourse of a given time, so they are just part, they're crystallisations of something that is going on and has been going on for a long time and will have further a future. Foucault stresses that there are usually breaks of the discourse. Things don't stay the same. There are things change, and these, he says, are generally connected with changes in power. Of course, most people who actively use and debate DA generally focus on very different discourses, but it seems to me the fundamental insights of discourse analysis can help us place the evidence of the Zoroastrian text in a clearer context. Also, whereas most students of modern discourse analysis have depth, we have length. We can imagine the extent written Zoroastrian text as snapshots, as it were, of part of a much broader and more differentiated Zoroastrian discourse. That discourse, reflected by the text, shows some breaks in the tradition, but mostly we see a remarkable continuity from the prehistoric authors of Zarathustra sometime before 1000 BCE to the works of the Sasanian priests and beyond. So, after a time when, academically, new definitions of Zoroastrianism have become so wide as to be actually meaningless. We'll come back to this. We can now, I hope, adopt approaches based on discourse analysis and oral studies to help us to rediscover the rules, the parameters that govern Zoroastrian discourse. We're coming to Zoroastrian oral studies where we find that there are currently two or three different lines, different types of Orientalists who focus on Zoroastrian studies. On the one hand, there are those who work deductively, who believe that it's possible to discover prescriptive laws governing orality and who reason deductively. There are others who reject this approach completely and stress the need for an inductive approach when, one, that first examines each tradition separately. Scholars like Otto Scherver and John Kellans belong to the first group. I and I thank Dr Stewart firmly belong to the second. Professor Hensiswag, examining the extent to which general theories are applicable to Zoroastrian texts, combines deductive and inductive elements and comes to very interesting conclusions. Now, the background to this miniscism about orality, to only a few players, is as follows. In the 1930s, Milman Parry, at the time assistant professor at Harvard University, studied and recorded oral epic poetry in Bosnia in the Serbo-Crowhead language with the help of Albert Lord, his assistant. The resulting insights have come to be known as the Parry Lord theory. Briefly, they have shown that some epic bards do not learn vast tracts of texts by heart, but learn the relevant themes, or topoi, and they learn certain rules and tricks of performance, which allows them to some extent to extemporize. Now, this is very interesting, and that is absolutely true. I'm sure about the Serbo-Crowhead epics, but it was then taken up by the classicists, especially at Harvard, and they understood Parry and Lord's findings not as referring to just the Serbo-Crowheads, but to all general, all oral poetry, and they applied their findings to Homeric studies. The resulting theories were hotly contested among Greek scholars, but they have a staunch advocate, a staunch defender in the Harvard professor, Dr Gregory Nodge, who is a specialist on Homer and who is doing excellent work. I'm not saying anything against him because I think his theories are applicable to Homer. But the problem is that the Harvard erranist, Dr Showe, best known for his purely philological work, was introduced to oral studies by Nudge. He then sought to apply what he believed to be, quote, the principles of oral literature, unquote, to the Avesta, which resulted in a number of publications, and particularly in a publication I rather regret, hymnic compositions of the India Vesta in 1994, which was promptly praised by Kellans in 1998, because, quote, it proposes a scheme of the history of the Avesta in text based on the common laws of oral literature, unquote. Well, as you know, I don't believe such common norms exist. Here we have two scholars, well-known admirers of each other's work, accepting a generaliser who, without any first-hand knowledge of the workings of oral transmission, have accepted a generalisation of Parian Lorde's work and proceeded deductively to apply theories based on the practices of modern Serbo-crowet epic poets to the religious traditions of ancient Iran. Outside Harvard, students of comparative oral literature have moved on and have generally come to the conclusion that few, if any, positive general rules can be formulated here. Each particular case needs to be studied inductively by a close examination about how the tradition functions and what its contents are. Contents are very important. Insights deriving from other countries may prove very helpful indeed. They often do, but this can only be accepted if it can be positively proven. In what follows, I will therefore start more or less from scratch on the basis of some familiarity with the modern academic literature on orality and of my first-hand experience of the transmission of the sacred literatures of the Azidis and Yoresan or Ahlehaq of Kurdistan. Now, what I would like to do in the rest of the lecture is first examine the question, what do we really mean by oral tradition, a term that is very often used in Zoroastrian studies also. Secretary, the history of the texts, then the process of memorising, as we know it from the Vesta, the units of texts that were memorised, the question of the development of certain texts, particularly the Yashts, the question of Zoroastrianisation. I'm sorry, I mean the extent to which Zoroastrian ideas were introduced to texts that originally were maybe pre or non Zoroastrian. And then oral studies can add some aspect to our understanding of that attitude which I would like to share with you, which finally results partly because of a major finding by Professor Hensa in a new way of looking at the garthers. Now first, oral tradition. It is quite misleading because the expression oral tradition is often used in Zoroastrian studies and elsewhere as an omnium gathering for a number of different traditions which together constitute the whole discourse. There is, on the one hand, religious texts, either memorised verbatim or memorised in a free or free transmission, not quite free, probably as we shall see, priestly knowledge, which again has at least two sides. There is an exegesis of a Vesta text already in the Yasna 19-21, but there is enough evidence to show that there was a great deal more general knowledge among the priesthood which they transmitted among themselves. Then the third category, which may or may not be a category, but I think it is important religious knowledge as it was discussed or negotiated between priests and laity. It is not the case that the laity always just listened. One way of listening, which happens, which I have seen often among Yazidis and others, is the priest holding forth and the audience listening uncritically, like being told a story and they just accept whatever they are told, but on other occasions we can see this. There must have been debate and there must have been, the audience must have been listening critically and saying yes, but what about nodium, astrology for instance, I mean in the Achaemenid period, they didn't have that and suddenly it enters the tradition. That seems to be the result of interactions between priests and laity and also interactions between the Vesta tradition, the Zoroastrian tradition and local culture, which played a role. There is also purely lay discourse on religion, which quite often repeats traditional knowledge, myths, stories, things about Zaratistra, how he laughed when he was born, I don't know, all these hagiographic things, but there was also discourse concerning Gregidgen and society, which might be inspired in my view. I have written about that a number of times that I believe the inscriptions are not so much objectively true as the result of what the kings wanted the people to believe. There is a religious aspect in that, but it is very clear that that was a way of influencing a lay discourse. There was also sometimes discourse seeking a break in tradition, namely for instance Mazdag, who was, if you ask me, a Zoroastrian priest who was very unhappy with the current situation and said this is not according to the teaching of Zoroastrianism and invoked the teaching of Zaratistra and created a revolution throughout the realm of Iran. After that, every continuity, I mean every interest of the laity in the Zand in the tradition was cut short because the king said now a laity are not allowed to learn the Zand and that continues, but we can't go into that too much unfortunately because there's no time. Now, we come to the history of the text. First of all, what we can, I think, say with certainty is that the Indo-Iranian tradition, the common tradition of the ancient Indians and ancient Iranians or proto-Indians, proto-Iranians, whatever, were contained on the one hand, mantic poetry, meaning texts that formulated hidden truths in order to compil the divinities as it were, to do what the poet wanted, and other poems which mainly praised the divinities and told them they were wonderful and told the people what these divinities had done. Now, Zoroastrian discourse begins with Zaratistra's message, which, as we shall see, constituted a clear break in the Indo-Iranian religious discourse. We also see that, in contrast to other texts that continued to be transmitted freely, the Garthas and the Astaghaptang Haity were memorised verbatim from an early stage and that language was never consciously adapted to the natural speech of those who recited them later. Those texts are said to be an old Avestan. Other texts, whose language continued to evolve together with the natural language of the people and whose text came to be fixed later, are said to be a young Avestan. After a time of development in the mid-6th century BCE, Zoroastrianism can be seen to have come to the Achaemenid Empire, to Persia, from the east to the west, and in Persia a different language, respectively, or different languages, they didn't speak Avestan. But Avestan continued to be the sacred language of the Zoroastrian tradition, in spite of everything. I mean, that's very interesting that the great powerful state of the Achaemenids did not say, oh, well, but now you're going to speak another language. They say, no, this is your sacred language. That is how it continued. Now, probably initially the priests representing Zoroastrianism in Persia were probably native speakers of Avestan or people who at least had a good active command of that language. But there was also, at that time, an established native priestly class in Western Iran, the priestly speaking, the Persian speaking Maghush. I won't be going on about old Persian, middle Persian, new Persian. The forms of Persian, obviously under the Achaemenians, Persian was old Persian, but I mean, I don't want to do it all the time because it gets boring. So the Persian speaking Maghush and the Elamite priesthood, the Shatim. And as Zoroastrianism, with its Avestan liturgy expanded, these other priesthoods apparently joined the new religious movement if it wants that. The development that gave rise to Zoroastrianism becoming the main religion in Western Iran. So let's call it a religious movement. Well, that meant they were required to recite Avestan liturgical text, but unlike the Indians, the Iranians don't seem to have developed any theoretical knowledge about language, so there had no technical means of teaching a foreign language. I mean, they could learn them by going somewhere, but for the whole Western Iranian priesthood it was probably impossible to learn Avestan as a language, so that you have a complete command. So instead, what they did, instead of learning Young Avestan, which would have allowed them to continue the tradition, making additions to it, or then saying, well, this is no longer a relevance, so we'll leave this out, they started learning to it by heart, the whole text by heart, word for word. So not just Agathas, which had always been recited, probably syllable by syllable, but now, I think, in the Achaemenid period, the other Avestan texts were also taught that way. That meant that a body of text that had so far been transmitted rather more freely now came to be transmitted in a fixed form, although there was still no way of writing Avestan. As it became ever more difficult to understand this ancient Avestan language, the priesthood solved the problem by developing a somewhat primitive method of translating an Avestan word with a fixed Persian equivalent, and teaching this translation, which was a bit problematic but comprehensible, as the basis of advanced priestly studies here by this tongue. Eventually, it was not just the Avestan text and the translation, but important commentaries by prominent teachers became a fixed part of the text to be memorised. So middle Persian translation and commentary were called Zand explanation or exegesis. Later again, in Sasanian times, a system was developed for writing Avestan adequately. That had not existed earlier, which meant that until then it had probably been impossible to read an unknown Avestan text from the page. There must have been attempts to write Avestan in cuniform or in whatever, but it wouldn't have been possible if you didn't know the text to read, say, middle Persian and say, well, I can read it. So until then, once a text had ceased to be recited, it was lost forever. But now that that was an alphabet, a book, a collection of sacred texts, which came to be known as Avestan, was written down. The idea was that this was the holy book of the Zoroastrians, which hadn't existed until then. That was the den, the tradition of which the priests knew and which other people didn't know. But now there was a sacred book. There is a theory that the word Avestag meant testament. I thought the word was borrowed directly from the Christians because there was no word for such a book. I think it is very likely, but a colleague of mine who is a specialist in Greek says yes, but they used a different word for the testament. I don't know, but it seems to me that if it isn't true, it was well invented. Then we come to what these priests actually memorised. As you know, the Zoroastrian priesthood is hereditary and in priestly families the children, the sons at least, were made to memorise the liturgical text at an early age and were generally taught by their parents, by their fathers or by someone else in the family, as Avesta says. The way they did it, oh gosh, well this is what I was just saying, I'm sorry. First, the candidate had to just listen to the teacher reciting the texts. That was Fframar concentrating, maybe counting the words, but I think Fframar really in Middle Persian means concentrating on, I mean giving your full attention to something. When that phase was over, they were allowed to recite the Holy Word softly, carefully, not to make it sound like a formal utterance, because as you know, if you pray Avesta formally and you make a mistake, that's a grave sin. So, that had to be avoided and people drun ja ia. Drun ja ia is something that's definitely not an official proper Avesta. After that, they were allowed to recite formally. The way Zarathustra is said to have recited the Gathas the first time, that was sarawaya. But if that was all right, they were really word perfect, they could also take part in rituals and they were allowed to perform it ritually, that is, yas. Now, if you think back to the Serbo-Crowats, much praised by Chavo, they extemporised, if you have this process of learning texts, of going, I mean, all liturgical texts were learned that way. It's hard to see how people would extemporise later on, so I don't believe in that. Anyway, the units of Avestan texts, I mean, it stands to reason really. I mean, first one learned a verse, God save our gracious Queen. Then a number of verse lines, when they were new the first verse, then they came to a stanza, or bachasthashti. God save our noble Queen, God save our Queen, that sort of a stanza. And we find them in the text, we see that those units exist. Then in the case of some texts, a number of those stanzas, bachasthashti, belonging together, formed a yasnog careti, which is a ritual, really, a performance of a small ritual of praise, but which in fact later was called a carde. A carde is a part of the text, which is meant to be coherent in itself, and ends with a characteristic conclusion. Ahay, ahay, ahay, ahay, et cetera, et cetera, and then ending with a young heart tongue. Finally, a sequence of a number of those cardes, or other longer sequences of texts, were also sort of learnt by heart, and those are now known as yasht, hym, or if they've formed part of the yasnog as a haiti or ha, or that's a chapter. Oh, I'm sorry. Well, we see that these categories really worked in the tradition, for instance. We occasionally see a single verse line emerging in more than one place. This is much more normal for a stanzal verse. You find them here, there, and everywhere. No, no, not that, but you find them in appropriate places more than once. It's sometimes, you find the same or a very similar carde in different yashts, suggesting that those units existed in the minds of the priests in a fixed form, and could be used as part of larger units. As to these larger units, for instance the yasht, which are quite long, most of them, from the point of view of content, first lines and stanzas are usually logically coherent. I mean, it's clear what is being said. The same is true of most, they're not all, cardeys, but on the other hand, when you look at the structure of many yashts, you find a very different picture. The same passage may occur twice in the same yasht, and again in a different yasht, yashten, cardeys 8, 8, 13, yasht 17, carde 4. Contradictory images occur next to each other, while cardeys dealing with the same aspect of a yasht as nature may be strewn more or less all over a yasht. That could mean, and that is only a theory, I can't prove it, but it seems to me logical, that original text used to praise the yashtas in pre-Achimenean times were much shorter, that the ritual themselves could be maybe shorter, than our yasht, and in fact consisted of one or more cardeys, and that different cardeys were transmitted in different families. Obviously, the priests didn't interact with each other in a priestly family, one transmitted one's knowledge, and since priests in Chora san were not in touch with priests in Paris, they would have developed different cardeys. Now the next, so the yasht might then have been composed on the basis of a collection of cardeys, praising a particular yashta from different traditions, which were put together as best the composers could, which was not an easy task. The next question would then be when and why the long yasht were composed. Logically, this would have been impossible during the time the texts were memorised at a young age, and transmitted in separate families over huge stretches of territory. But there simply would not have been a way in oral transmission, you can't just, I mean the government can't say, and now we're going to use a different version of the Bible also, because those books are not available. You can't reach people who have memorised a text in a certain way and wish to continue memorising in that way. But there is one point I can see, a bottleneck point in the history of Zoroastrianism, where this might have happened, namely during the Achaemenid period, when, if I'm right, a comparatively small number of native Avestan speakers taught Avestan texts to a much larger number of Western Iranian priests, Magwsh and Shaten, and they memorised the texts verbatim as they were taught them, and then passed them on to their children. Now that generation, or under those circumstances, priests could have been taught a new group of texts, a newly formed group of texts, in such a way that a longer type of Yast was introduced. It seems to me the only possible time and contingency where this could happen. Also, of course, we see, well, yes, we see that the sequence of the Yastes, as we know them, follows that of the days of the calendar, and the calendar was probably instituted, as we know, in Achaemenid times. So, presumably, the Yazetas of the calendar now had to be praised with their own Yastes on their name day, and that Yastes had to be a bit elaborate, not just, oh, we worship Mithra, thank you very much, I mean, Mithra is fantastic, Mithra is great, Mithra did this, and then a long thing, because that was agreeable to Mithra, I suppose. So, as a hypothesis, I would suggest that this is, when short characters in praise of different Yazetas, of which there must have been a great many, were combined into what we know as the Yastes. Now, if we study the Yastes, we also see that a corpus of verses dedicated to a Yazeta can often be preceded by a few verses showing the overlordship of Ahura Mazda over that divinity. Ahura Mazda, I think, created Mithra and said, we're good. Ahura Mazda did something to Advisura at night, I can't remember whether he created her or greeted her, but, I mean, you'll find at the beginning, typically at the beginning, which is easy to remember, not in the middle, which is more difficult in all text, you'll find these texts. That suggests that older texts could continue to be recited, more or less as usual, but some verses referring to key elements of Zoroastrian beliefs could be added to them, a process that I would like to call Zoroastrianisation, partly because Kellan's accuses me of believing in Zoroastrianisation, which in his view is terrible. I do indeed believe in such a thing, but academically speaking, the gradual realisation that the extant Zoroastrian texts do not represent all Zoroastrian discourse has led a number of scholars to claim that any ancient religious phenomenon in the Iranian realm must be Zoroastrian, and that we're not capable of ever distinguishing between what is typically Zoroastrian and not typically Zoroastrian. The lamented and dear friend Patricia Crane goes so far as to state that the belief in reincarnation and in the manifestation of divine beings in human form could have formed part of what she calls provincial Zoroastrianism. In other words, to use discourse analysis, in Crane's view, Zoroastrian discourse developed without any perceptible rules. It could go any which way. There were no boundaries. And as far as the teachings were concerned, now much as I appreciate Patricia Crane's work, I find it fantastic, but here I beg to differ. If one accepts that Zoroastrianism represented a clear break in the Indo-Iranian religious tradition, beginning with Zaratustra, and that its rules, its parameters, gradually affected all religious texts, or many religious texts recited by Zoroastrians, then, to me, it seems to follow that although the boundaries of Zoroastrian beliefs were definitely wider than was once thought, the continuity found in the texts suggests that certain boundaries did very much exist. Such topoi as Ahura Mazda himself, to my view, is a Zoroastrian divinity, only Zoroastrian. The Amesha Spintas, the key oppositions between good and evil, the idea of a judgment after this life, as well as quotations from the garthers and references to Zaratustra, can, in my view, all be regarded as typically Zoroastrian elements. Reincarnation, I'm sorry, cannot. Of course, if that is true, it's only relevant if there was truly such a thing as Zoroastrianism, and not just a vague movement that happened to believe in a person who didn't really exist, or persons, but, well, I'm trying to imitate Kellan's. I can't because I've never really understood him. But if we believe that there was such a figure as Zaratustra, we can wonder what oral studies and discourse analysis can add to our knowledge of him. Now, we know that the poetry of Zaratustra is relatively similar in style and content to ancient and Indian Vedic texts, and that after centuries of developing a shared religious tradition, the Proto-Indians and Proto-Iranians then separated and had been apart for some considerable time at the time when Zaratustra lived. So, since Zaratustra does it, does compose mantic verses, it may legitimately conclude that the Indo-Iranian tradition of composing new mantic verses that used well-formulated truth as a means to force to go on to comply with the poet's wishes must have existed among the Iranians before Zaratustra. It is clearly in a rural culture that he can only have learned this priestly craft from living teachers, as there were no books available. So, we may assume that this tradition of composing mantic poetry must have gone on among the Iranians, otherwise Zaratustra wouldn't have been able to do it. Now, in the Vedas, the words of great seers were memorised together with the names of the authors. So, in a cognate Indo-Iranian tradition, the names of many seers are remembered until this day, and Zaratustra must have learned his craft from these earlier seers who did this. So, if that is so, why do the extant Iranian texts not mention any other seers or attribute any text to them or any good seers, one or two evil ones, the wicked, so on, so on? I mean, we find only references to Zaratustra. There, or all studies, has a good solution because we know that in Kurdistan, there is quite often the question of conscious forgetting the two tribes that have been at war with each other and had songs calling each other. I don't know what and bad names and saying how terrible the enemy was, make peace, and the Bard consciously said, no, no, we won't recite those songs anymore because that's not good. So, there is such a thing as deciding not to repeat certain things in oral tradition, and once one generation stops repeating it, the situation is gone. Again, no books. So, together with the fact that the Gathas were memorised verbatim, which suggests that they were particularly holy or potent, we also see that instead of the Indo-Iranian tradition of naming all previous authors of successful texts, older Iranian mantrans are deliberately forgotten, consciously omitted, presumably because only Zaratustra's texts were felt worthy of being used to address the divinities. So, Zaratustra's status in early Zoroastrianism may have been fundamentally different from that of the Indo-Iranian seers, that of the Veda, because he was seen as the only figure believed to have perceived the will of the Ahuras. We might even speak of the first Indo-Iranian prophet, but I wouldn't, well, you know, commit myself to that because I leave it to people who know what exactly a prophet is, but it seems to me it was a very, very special figure in the Indo-Iranian tradition. Now, we come then to the Gathas, where we have to understand some points. I've already mentioned the truth mantra, which is very much the genre that Zaratustra uses. He shows the gods that he knows the hidden truth, and, therefore, he asked them to help him. But there's another thing that is quite interesting. In a recent work, Cianus Rezzania, now Professor in Bochum, has shown that in Zaratustra's view, there are two times, and we know that, there are two times, an endless time in Zoroastrianism and a limited time. We have always thought that that meant that you had endless time, endless time, and then break, there is limited time, end of limited time, and it goes on. What he has proven, and which is borne out by the traditions of the Aziris and the Atahak, that this is not true. In our time, the two realities coexist at the same time, and very much of religious poetry has to do with the interaction between our earthly sphere and this absolute sphere. As I understand this, Cianus Rezzania has just said this about endless and limited time, but as I understand it, Zaratustra believed in the simultaneous existence of two different modes of reality, an essential, unchanging reality, which was typically the sphere of Ahura Mazda, and the mundane, changing reality that we experience on Earth. Ahura Mazda created the fundamental laws, mantras, which I like to translate as algorithms, governing this temporary state, but he's hardly ever depicted as interfering in it directly, at least not in the garthons. Once or twice, there is a reference, but normally he stays in his sphere, and the angels, the Amishas Panthas and other Yazartas, especially Mithra and Srascha, can move from one sphere to the other. A gifted mantec priest can also reach the eternal from the temporary sphere by means of his sacred poetry. If his formulation of truth is exceptional, it may bring about direct contact with the supernatural. Now something which might interest you, which I find interesting, to illustrate the use of the discourse analysis, this is an article by Philip Graham, Thomas Keenan, and Anne-Marie Dowd on the historical analysis of George W. Bush's declaration of war on terror, where they say they compare George Bush's declaration of war with speeches by Pope Urban II from 1095, Queen Elizabeth I and Adolf Hitler, no less, to exemplify the structure, function and historical significance of such texts in Western society over the last millennium. And they identify four generic features that could have endured in such texts throughout this period. Those are an appeal to legitimate power, to a legitimate power source outside the orator, and which is presented as inherently good, say Ahura Mazda. An appeal to the historical importance of the culture in which the discourse is situated. May the evil spirit not break the order of the world a second time. The construction of a fairly evil other, such as Angra Manu, and an appeal for unification behind the legitimating external power source. In this case, possibly Zaratustra. Now, as I see it, I mean you could see this coming, it's not a surprise, I think, to understand George Bush. It also makes sense when one studies the Gathos. So, we can say about Zaratustra that he was, I mean he was calling people to arms. He was probably not calling the Ysatras to arms. He was calling his own people to arms. So, he wanted to motivate his followers to engage in a conflict with a group that he regarded as religiously misguided. First of all, that means a break in traditional discourse because, as Bernfried Schliera has already seen, phedic texts are always addressed exclusively to the gods. In the case of the Gathos, Zaratustra is both seeking to address the divinities with formulations of truth, but at the same time he's presenting his message to his followers, seeking to convince them of the truth of his teachings and calling them to arms to follow him. That's another major break. And, as Professor Hinze has remarked, if Zaratustra was conveying a message to his human audience, then they must be understandable. They must be comprehensible to that audience, which implies that if we're lucky, it may be possible for us to catch at least a glimpse. Now, the last element is something that all oralists would have thought and that until Professor Hinze came along, no philologist believed because we were taught that the sequence of the Gathos was an artificial one, the sequence based on meter. That was, I mean, that was gospel. Now, Professor Hinze has used philology to prove that the sequence we have was indeed at a very early time, if not the original one. It was probably the original one. This part of oral studies as well, as oralists would have said, yes, there's no way someone who learns these difficult texts by heart and usually repeats them every night, so as not to forget them, would suddenly start changing sequences. But that's all an oralist could have said. Professor Hinze has shown that this is the case that we have the proper sequence of texts. And that helps us. This is a key insight which allows us to look at the Gathos in a new way, focusing on the actual contents, like looking at Yasna 28 as a beginning. So now I have to get out of here and do something else. I'm sorry, I'll find it. This is as the... Is this visible? No, no, no, it's getting... OK. Well, this is my summary of the Gathos. I've been working on the Gathos for the past six years or so, and quite hard since I retired. I'm not saying that my translations and interpretations are better, but they do make sense in terms of what I believe the texts were about. So we can look at it. And then I'm trying to show you that most of the Gathos can be understood by the liturgy of a ritual in its own right with a mysterious culmination, the Yasnahtanghaiti, which we can discuss. First, we have... before the actual Gathos begin, we have the end of Yasnaht 27, prayers, y fawr iaethau hŵr fawr i ŵr, asyn fawr hŵr i ŵr iaethau hŵr, prayers mostly to the gods. Not so much for the people, it's their prayers for God to understand. Then we begin Yasnaht 28, which indeed begins as a beginning. Zarathustra, with outstretched hands, announces that he's a knowledgeable priest who intends to compose new mantic poetry for Mazda. And if Mazda comes to Zarathustra's aid by inspiring him, then Zarathustra will help to make the world as it was in the beginning. Zarathustra is saying time and time again that gods want the good things, but they need people to realise them in this world because they can't, they haven't got the physical power. Now, the next thing, the next Ha that has been quite often neglected by scholars because here we have to do with a cow speaking and many of my colleague found that embarrassing. I mean a prophet who says that a cow can speak. I have a different way in my view this is a key text, a theodicy. A theodicy is a statement as to why God means well even though there are horrible things in this world. I think the fundamental problem here is defined by using the plight of the cow at the hands of the other party as an example. Now the creator of the cow who is a sort of advocate of the cow who can talk to Mazda, why the cow is subjected to such maltreatment and then Ahura Mazda says something very important to my mind a key pronunciation. He says that he has created a good mantra algorithm for the cow, namely the cow was made for fat and milk and that was good, but what is lacking is a ratu is someone to make it all right to cause a rata, a rata to come to earth and that we are led to understand might will be that ideal ratu, zaratustra well why not. So God has created perfect fundamental rules for the world in his absolute sphere, but in our temporary sphere it's up to humans to implement those in the correct way so that God's will can be done meaning God is ideal God is absolute but in this world there is a problem and it can only be fought for by humans. Immediately after that it is totally logical is an explanation, why is that well that is because there are two forces in the world, good and evil two principles, they were seen as twins in a dream those who make the wrong choice following the principle of evil and that is God's as well as men quite unlike the Veda I mean I've never heard of sinful God but anyway maybe you have ruined the world and will eventually be punished now this is clearly a formulation of truth but it seems to be addressed primarily to a human audience and not so much to Yazartas who presumed he knew this but for the audience it must have been quite a shocking idea that the world was not as the Gods wanted it but in fact there were two there was an evil power as well as a good one in the world that's the cause of the problem Zarathustra then says he and his theories will win Ahura Mazda's approval because he recites true words and asks for further help he begins asking rhetorical questions leading the audience to understand that Zarathustra's theory is right and that the opponents do not adhere to the right beliefs and will come to a bad end then 32 is as one could imagine is almost a discourse on sin the text introduces the concept of of sin as exemplified by the wicked Grachma who is a wicked person I don't quite know what he did and then sin he says it is implied is inherent in the world because even the good Yma Jamshid eventually became sinful and was therefore removed but sin here is mostly firmly associated with the DIY worshipers who will face punishment never mind the Yasnaf 28 that we can't go into that I mean there are many correspondences between different texts but that's too then again something which I think is essential for understanding Zarathustra's view he's not a Mohammed who says I'm a nobody please I'm your slave God he says I'm a person I mean nothing against Islam but I mean I'm just saying that in Abrahamic religions mostly men are small and God is almighty here he says well we're the only ones who can actually carry out your things you must understand that and we can't do it without you he says that Zarathustra is a ratur who acts in accordance with primeval laws and because he's a good ritual priest his act of worship will allow the divinities to acquire the physical strength if they come to attend and this way Zarathustra strengthens the divinity while they must give him aid so it's a do o des I mean it's an interaction between the two and then something very spectacular happens at least to me maybe well I find it very spectacular here we have a text that says there is something important coming it begins by indicating that a key point in the ritual has now been prepared goes on to describe aspects of the ritual as if they were about to occur and would result in a direct contact with our Amazda through which the world might become ideal now one could read the latter part of the text as an announcement of an imminent chance like state of vision he says when I'm asleep and it is always well he can't go to sleep when he's doing a ritual so it can't be sleep but supposing it is something like sleep well when I'm asleep Zarathustra hopes to perceive the great truths and then climax intermission Zarathustra is silent stops is somewhere else but we have another text a text that is not the same genre as the dagathas which is its ritual prose rather than poetry it is the community speaking we worship so we think this and that we think not our Amazda Zarathustra saying me no call to action rather an affirmation of belief in our Amazda and other key elements of Zarathustra there's no question of oh well we're very much against the dialogues we believe in this, we believe in that we worship all manner of things Professor Hintzer then has very interestingly suggested that this moment a fire might be lit because fire imagery is very strong in this this is quite true I mean I don't know but it could well be true and it's a very interesting point I thought that maybe simultaneously Zarathustra might be having a vision I mean it might be a reenactment of what priests do all the time of the time that Zarathustra who saw a vision coming actually had this vision and was therefore silent all the people the community well entertained well you know what I mean I mean they entertained the divers they had to say something so then there comes an interesting text which is not part of the Ysdabdanghaity which we will skip here but then we go back to a new garther the second garther the Ustavaiti which tells us about an approach to a vision there is an introductory passage where I'm a bit bothered by an hour's subjunctive mung high which I can't place quite but anyway it is as though he repeats that he was looking for a vision but then immediately afterwards there is someone he asked Mazda to let him be in touch with the long life which is an expression also used elsewhere meaning presumably the absolute world I'm over running I'm nearly finished then someone approaches him interrogates him and apparently causes him to realise many hidden things Zarathustra quote was instructed about the primeval stage he prays for foresight which Mazda can give and which will help Zarathustra achieve Mazda's purposes next Ha goes on about the revelation Zarathustra is now in direct contact with Mazda asking him rhetorical and real questions through which he also expands his own world view to his hearers and gradually he comes away from the vision and he begins to talk about the community he says that there has to be a good community and that the divers were never good rulers and other communities are not worth a fig I mean we must be you know then once more the fundamental opposition between good and evil is in the light presumably here of Zarathustra's recent vision there's a clear references to a community again like-minded people opposition between good and wicked communities is stressed and there's an explicit exposition of Zarathustra's teaching he then sums up the teachings towards the end of that gartha we're clearly past the culmination of the ceremony and Zarathustra aims to link the social and political affairs of his community to the insight he's just gained new gartha on the great role of Spinta Minu Spinta Minu who's the lord of this world not Ahura Mazda Ahura Mazda is above our world Mary Boyce wouldn't believe this but I think it's absolutely true Ahura Mazda is she's everything but cannot interfere directly Spinta Minu is the good lord of this world and he is on the side of the writers the original perfect order of the world which he represented was upset by the evil one Ahura Mazda is said again as it's created the laws governing the world and in doing so has established the fundamental laws of the dinar which maybe mean the ways that Zarathustra sees things then sin again again we come back our themes come back not the grammar this time of the wicked Bandwa who's stolen Zarathustra's grain if I'm not mistaken and wicked people generally that is we know by now but then he introduces his patrons which is fairly typical at the end of a text in Indian literature I mean people want money or rewards from the patrons but when they come to the end they start mentioning the patrons and he does it here he shows them his power to communicate and then at the end of that Zarathustra asks for reward for his skills and suggests the ritual is ending I shall send you the best mantras ask for rewards and that is the last of that which already suggests an ending but this ending is very clear and the next gartha which is only one ha to my mind the conclusion of the ritual summing up the message good versus evil Zarathustra's patrons are mentioned again very clearly more clearly than that I think that is indeed the end of the ritual because there's a ystaf 53 which I absolutely can't do anything with I mean I've tried but it seems to me strange and the same is true of a recent author M. L. West unfortunately he's died in the hymns of Zarathustra who said this may be the only gartha that's not by Zarathustra I'm not saying it but I mean I could, I can imagine he may be right in any case that ystaf 53 is not part of my idea of this ritual the last gartha is only the aria man is your prayer which harks back to the beginning where there were prayers typically to the gods here it's a prayer for the community so I'm coming to the end you must be very relieved to hear it to sum up in the light of the mythological approach we've discussed the gartha is a ystaf 53 it can be understood as an early liturgy in their own right constructed around a climatic event possibly the lighting of a fire or perhaps originally a re-enactment of Zarathustra's original moment of vision all this invites further question about many things that I hope I've convinced you that a modern approach to Zarathustran studies may worth trying thank you very much thank you very much Professor Crainbrooke for this enlightening lecture taking us through all of the garthas and many aspects of this fascinating Zarathustran tradition which has so much depth to it that invites us to explore all the various aspects of it and we see more and more the significance of the orality that underlies this tradition up to the present day