Zoroastrian tradition treats the Gathas and the wider Avestan liturgy as manthra, a term related to the Sanskrit mantra, denoting sacred utterance whose religious efficacy is bound up with the precise sound of its recitation and not solely with the meaning a listener extracts from it. This shared root reflects a broader Indo-Iranian religious inheritance in which correctly performed ritual speech, not merely correct belief, was treated as doing real work in the world. This has consequences for how the texts are transmitted and performed. Correct pronunciation, meter and chant contour are treated as integral to the liturgy functioning at all, which is one reason Zoroastrian priests historically trained through years of oral instruction from a senior priest rather than through independent reading of a written text, even after Avestan script existed to record the material.
The chanted delivery of the Yasna, the central liturgical ceremony built around the Gathas, is performed by a priest, usually with an assistant, in a ritually purified space, and the recitation itself, alongside offerings of water, fire and haoma, a ritually prepared plant extract, is understood as constituting the ceremony rather than accompanying some separate ritual action that the words merely describe.