A Year of Work Before the Fire Is Lit

Zoroastrian consecrated fires are graded, and the Atash Behram is the highest grade. What distinguishes it is the consecration rather than the building. Fires are gathered from many different sources representing the trades and conditions of ordinary life, and one of them must be taken from lightning, which means waiting for a strike and securing the fire from it. Each is then purified separately through a long sequence of rituals before the fires are united into one, and Mary Boyce's account of Zoroastrian practice describes a process taking about a year and requiring a considerable number of priests working continuously.

Once established, the fire is never allowed to go out. It is tended at fixed intervals through the day and night by a priest in the prescribed state of purity, wearing a cloth over the mouth so that his breath does not touch it, and fed with sandalwood and other clean fuel. The fire is not itself the object of worship in Zoroastrian teaching. It is the purest visible thing, and worship is directed towards Ahura Mazda in its presence, a distinction the tradition has had to restate for outside observers for a very long time, and one that the description of Zoroastrians as fire worshippers has never stopped obscuring. The building around the fire is comparatively plain, since what is consecrated is the flame and not the architecture, and its plan is organised around keeping the chamber separate and the fire attended.