A Living Faith and Its Crisis: The Zoroastrians Today
A standalone piece The temptation in writing about Zoroastrianism is to keep it in the past tense — the religion of Cyrus, the root of this or that later idea, a tradition studied for what it gave to others. But it is not a dead religion. It has adherents, fire temples, priests, and rites being performed right now, and it is facing, in the present, a crisis as serious as anything in its long history: not persecution this time, but the slow arithmetic of disappearance.
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A standalone piece The temptation in writing about Zoroastrianism is to keep it in the past tense — the religion of Cyrus, the root of this or that later idea, a tradition studied for what it gave to others. But it is not a dead religion. It has adherents, fire temples, priests, and rites being performed right now, and it is facing, in the present, a crisis as serious as anything in its long history: not persecution this time, but the slow arithmetic of disappearance. To treat Zoroastrianism as a living faith means looking squarely at the community that carries it and the threat it is living through. Two communities, one faith The world's Zoroastrians today number only around 100,000 to 140,000 — a startlingly small figure for a religion of this antiquity and influence.[^1] They fall into two main historic communities.
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