Ushahin Gah

The deep night is named, in the Zoroastrian system, not for its darkness but for what ends it: Ushahin is the watch of Ushah, dawn, though it begins at midnight when dawn is furthest away. The naming is the theology. The hours when the powers of disorder press hardest are claimed in advance for the light that will defeat them, and the being who holds the line meanwhile is Sraosha, whose name means hearkening or obedience: the divine attentiveness itself, first of creation to worship Ahura Mazda, armed and vigilant, patrolling the world against the demons while humanity sleeps. Sraosha's vigil makes the watch the proper time for the religion's most strenuous liturgy, the Vendidad service, the six-hour recitation of the law against the demons performed within this gah precisely because the enemy it addresses is then strongest.

For the ordinary believer the watch asks less: those who wake in the night retie the kusti and say the Ushahin prayer, and the tradition, knowing the cost of leaving a warm bed, credits night prayer with special merit, a sentiment its neighbouring religions echo in the tahajjud of Islam and the vigils of Christian monasticism. The watch ends with the religion's most charming piece of sacred zoology: the rooster is Sraosha's creature, and his crowing before first light is understood as the yazata's summons, the whole animal creation joining the guardian of the night in waking the faithful to the day's first prayer.

Ushahin completes a structure worth standing back from. Across the five gahs the Zoroastrian day assigns every hour a guardian and every guardian a greeting, and the night watch shows the system's purpose most nakedly, because night is where the system is tested. Zoroastrian dualism takes darkness seriously: the hours from midnight to dawn belong, in the tradition's cosmology, to the counter-creation's strongest efforts, the time when corpse-pollution walks and the frost demon works.

The response is not avoidance but garrison. Sraosha stands guard; the priesthood, on the nights it performs the Vendidad service, stands with him; the souls of the dead are prayed for in this watch, whose third night after death is when the soul faces its judgment at the Chinvat bridge, making Ushahin the traditional time for the funerary ceremonies of the third night; and any believer who wakes joins the line with a prayer.

Boyce's fieldwork in the Iranian villages recorded the practice's domestic texture, elderly Zoroastrians rising in the night to pray as their ancestors had, and the diaspora keeps the watch where sleep allows. Set beside the Christian night office and the Muslim tahajjud, the Ushahin Gah is the oldest member of a small family of institutions that refuse to concede the night, and its wager is the same as theirs: that a tradition which prays in the dark owns the whole day, not just the lit part of it.