Religion, Health and Suffering

John R. Hinnells,Roy Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136175855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First Published in 1999. The interaction between religion and medicine is universal throughout recorded history. They meet at the great turning points of life: at birth, at moments of acute suffering and at death. Not only are priest and doctor often needed at the same time and place, the two roles have also been combined in ancient and modem societies. This volume looks at whether healers and religions have worked in harmony or been in conflict, as well as their frequent and substantive interaction. An International Workshop lies behind this volume and one of the distinctive features of this project is that it brought together scholars of religion, historians of medicine, anthropologists and medical practitioners.

I

Health and Suffering in Zoroastrianism

John R. Hinnells

Introduction

Zoroastrianism is the religion started in Iran by the prophet Zoroaster in approximately 1,200 BCE. It is, therefore, one of the earliest of the prophetic religions. For over a thousand years, from the founding of the Persian empire in the sixth century BCE until the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE, it was the official religion of the world’s largest empires of those eras. When Islam conquered Iran, the Zoroastrians were increasingly oppressed and forced to retreat into the secure obscurity of remote desert settlements, mainly near Yazd and Kerman, where a few thousand survive to the present day.¹ During the regime of the last Shah many Zoroastrians flourished, but with the founding of the Islamic Republic by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 they assumed a lower public profile, and a number (mostly, but not only, well-to-do people from Tehran) migrated to the West, mainly to California and British Columbia and some to Europe.

But the more numerous Zoroastrians are the Parsis in India. When life under Islam became severe in the ninth century, a small band of Zoroastrians set out from the province of Pars and settled on the North West coast of India and were known as the people from Pars, or Parsis. Under British rule they flourished as middlemen in trade, pursued Western education in proportionately large numbers and thereby became leaders in various professions and in politics. Their educated Bombay leaders became very Westernised.² From the eighteenth, but especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they travelled around the world for trade and for study, establishing small communities in Hong Kong, East Africa, America and Australia. Their oldest and largest settlement outside India is in London.³ This paper will consider the Zoroastrian teachings on health and suffering under four headings: (a) the theology of the classical literature; (b) the ancient folklore out of which much theology grew, but which survives in some popular practices; (c) modem beliefs and practices both in the old countries and in the dispersion; (d) a conclusion on the implications for health care workers caring for Zoroastrians.

(A) Traditional Zoroastrian Theology

This section is based primarily on texts written down around the ninth century in the Middle Persian (or Pahlavi) language to support the faithful in the face of Islamic persecution.⁴ Some of the texts are summaries and translations of the ancient Avestan scriptures in a language now little understood; other texts are expositions of the faith in the light of contemporary experiences. Much of the theology expounded here is, therefore, an expression of earlier thought, some going back to the time of the prophet, and is based on an even older cosmology. The logical point at which to begin the exposition is with the concept of creation.⁵

Fundamentally, Zoroastrians believe that if good in the world makes you believe in God, Ohrmazd, then the reality of evil, exemplified in the suffering of the innocent, logically leads to a belief in a devil, Ahriman.⁶ There appear to have been several ancient Iranian creation myths.⁷ In what emerged as the classical Zoroastrian doctrine of creation, God and the ‘devil’, Ohrmazd and Ahriman, existed independently of each other from the beginning. Ohrmazd dwells on high in endless light, perfect but not all powerful because of the existence of Ahriman who dwells below in deepest darkness. Due to his inveterate ignorance, Ahriman was unaware of Ohrmazd’s existence, but Ohrmazd in his omniscience knew of Ahriman and created the world as a trap in which to ensnare and destroy evil.⁸ First the world was created in mēnōg form, that is invisible and intangible. After three thousand years Ohrmazd then created the mēnōg world in gētīg, that is visible, tangible form. The material world is not, therefore, the opposite of the spiritual, as it is in many religions, but rather the embodiment of the spiritual. The world of mēnōg and gētīg is commonly referred to in Zoroastrianism as ‘the Good Creation’. In its original state the world was perfect. Humanity, the plant and animal creations were without need, at peace, deathless. But on seeing this Good Creation, Ahriman, typical of his destructive instincts, attacked the world inflicting suffering, misery, disease and death. In Zoroastrian thought the whole of existence reflects the ultimate cosmic battle between good and evil: opposed to light there is dark; to the heavenly beings there are the demonic forces; to life there is death; to divinely created health there is demonically caused suffering; to beauty there is ugliness; to beneficent, holy animals like the dog or cow, there are evil creatures (khrafstras) characterised by their destructive instincts, such as snakes, lizards and scorpions, though the most common image of death is the polluting fly. And so the Good Creation was subject to evil assault. The face of the earth was seething with noxious creatures, the sacred creation of the fire was afflicted by smoke; plants withered and died, and the archetypal creature and person were assaulted with pain, suffering and ultimately death. The natural human condition, therefore, is a state of perfection, health and immortality. Pain, fever, ill health and mortality are unnatural conditions. Disease and infection are the works of Ahriman.⁹

The history of the world is the story of the battle between the forces of good and evil. Humanity is thought of as Ohrmazd’s chief weapon or helper (hamkār). Zoroastrians believe that if people follow the ideals of the Good Religion, as revealed through Zoroaster, then ultimately good will triumph over evil. They look forward not to the end of the world, for that would be the end of Ohrmazd’s Creation, but to its renovation (frašegird). There will, at the end of history, be a final cosmic battle as the forces of good and evil pair off in combat. In its death throes, evil will unleash one last assault on the world so that all social values will be overthrown, the young will not respect their elders, nor the students their teachers; the chaos will be cosmic also, the sun and moon will not give their light. But good will triumph. A saviour will come and raise the dead, for if death were the end of life then Ahriman’s destruction of the divinely created body would represent his victory. When everyone dies they face a judgement before the divine scales. If the good thoughts, words and deeds outweigh the evil then the soul is guided across the bridge of judgement by a beautiful maiden, the manifestation of the person’s conscience, to the house of light and song, heaven. If the evil outweigh the good then the soul is led trembling by an ugly old hag, the manifestation of the soul’s conscience, across the bridge from where it falls into hell, a place of darkness, foul stench, bad food and punishment. The rewards and punishments are made to fit the crime, or the virtue, for the purpose of hell is corrective. This first judgement after death is clearly one of the mēnōg dimension of a person, for-its ḡetīg body can be seen to remain on earth after death. The purpose of the resurrection is, in part, to enable the judgement of the ḡetīg, and body and soul return to heaven and hell, as appropriate. But once rewarded or punished and after passing the trial of molten metal, the purified person dwells in heaven, which is literally the best of both worlds, of the mēnōg and the ḡetīg. The second reason for the resurrection is that the whole human being, body and soul, can dwell with Ohrmazd. With evil defeated, Ohrmazd is now not only all good and omniscient, but also all powerful. Suffering, misery, disease and death are eradicated.

The myth expresses key ideas for the traditional Zoroastrian understanding of the body and of suffering. The material world is not opposed to the spiritual but its expression. Because the spiritual and material worlds are so interrelated, health necessarily involves the good state of both aspects of human life. The ḡetīg world is the divine creation, consequently evil cannot assume ḡetīg form. It can only dwell like a parasite within the ḡetīg body, or work through the form of noxious creatures. In one sense, therefore, evil does not really exist for it can exist only in the unseen mēnōg Whereas in some religions, the human being is a spiritual entity trapped in the body in an evil, alien material world, in Zoroastrianism the opposite is the case. To use Western terms, the devil is an evil spiritual force trapped in what is for it the alien environment of a good material world.¹⁰

How does this understanding of human nature demand that one should live? The basic duty is summed in a Pahlavi text, the Dēnkard:

It is possible to put Ahriman out of the world in this manner, namely every person, for their own part, chases him out of their body, for the dwelling of Ahriman in the world is in people’s bodies. When he will have no dwelling in people’s bodies, he will be annihilated from the whole world, – for as long as there is in this world dwelling even in a single person a small demon, Ahriman is in the world. [Instead] The heavenly forces should be made to inhabit that place which if they inhabit, they are made to inhabit the whole of this world, and the heavenly forces, too, when they made rulers over people’s bodies, they are rulers over the whole world.¹¹

The demons which are to be ejected include Violence, Fury, Greed, Wrath, Sloth, and the essence of all evil, the Lie. But while people are caught up in this conflict, they are assaulted by such evils as pain, suffering and death.

The concept of pollution is important for an understanding of Zoroastrian attitudes to health and medicine. Any dead object is the scene where evil is powerfully present. The greatest focus of such evil pollution is the corpse of a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section I: Cross-Cultural Studies
• Section II: Non-European Health Systems
• Section III: Pre-Modem Western Medicine
• Section IV: Modern Medicine
• Index
• Contributors