The Sacred Fire

In Iranian religion fire (Avestan ātar) is the purest and most honoured of the creations, the earthly presence of aša/arta, the right order, and the medium through which worship rises. It is venerated rather than worshipped as a god in its own right: the fire is where the divine is met, kept ritually pure and never defiled. The Magi are its keepers, tending it and, so the sources say, guarding it from the pollution of the human breath with a cloth over the mouth and nose while they chant.

Open air, not temple

For the Achaemenid period the evidence points to worship in the open air and at free-standing fire-holders, not in enclosed temples. Herodotus says flatly that the Persians build no temples and no altars, but go up to the high places to sacrifice; the twin stone plinths at Pasargadae and the fire-holders carved on the royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam — where the king stands with his hand raised before a burning fire-holder, beneath the winged symbol — show the ritual furniture of that worship. The great enclosed fire-temple, housing an ever-burning consecrated fire, is a later, Sasanian institution; to picture the Achaemenids worshipping in fire-temples is one of the commonest anachronisms in accounts of the period, and this compendium avoids it.

What the fire meant

Fire joined the other honoured elements — water, earth, the sun — as a creation to be kept undefiled, which is why the Iranians neither burned nor buried their dead in a way that would pollute it (see the Magi on the exposure of corpses). The reverence was deep and enduring; it is the one feature of Persian religion that every outside observer, Greek and later, records.