Atash Behram

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.

There are very few Atash Behrams in service anywhere, eight of them in India and one in Iran, which is a small number for a religion with a continuous history of some three thousand years. The reason is the cost of consecration and the requirement that the fire then be maintained without interruption for as long as it exists, which commits a community permanently. Individual fires are therefore known by name and by their history, and a Zoroastrian can say which one they are speaking about the way a Catholic might name a particular basilica. Access to the chamber where the fire burns is restricted to Zoroastrians, and the atlas records that restriction as the community's own rule rather than describing what happens inside.

John Hinnells's study of the Zoroastrian diaspora identifies the problem this creates for a scattered community. Zoroastrians now live in substantial numbers in countries with no consecrated fire of the highest grade, and the demographic decline of the community, together with disputes about who counts as a Zoroastrian, bears directly on whether the existing fires can be maintained. The atlas records the question as live and as one for the community rather than for outside observers to settle.