The Fravashis Who Guide the Living

Before you were born, you made a choice.

This is the Zoroastrian teaching on the fravashi: that every human soul has a divine counterpart — the fravashi, sometimes translated as the guardian spirit or the pre-existent soul — that existed in the spiritual realm before the material world was made, and that chose, when Ahura Mazda asked, to descend into the material creation to fight against Angra Mainyu.

The asking is preserved in the Farvardin Yasht, the great hymn to the fravashis, which is one of the longest and most beautiful texts in the Avestan corpus. Ahura Mazda, about to create the material world and knowing what it will face — the assault of the Hostile Spirit, the corruption of creation, the suffering that will attend material existence until the final renovation — presents the fravashis with a choice.

He says: I am going to make you material. You will exist in bodies, in time, subject to decay and death and the attacks of Angra Mainyu. You can stay in the spiritual realm in your perfection, or you can descend into the material world and fight with me against evil.

The fravashis, the text says, chose to descend.

This transforms everything about the Zoroastrian understanding of human existence: you are not a spiritual being imprisoned in matter, as the Gnostics and many Platonists believed. You are a spiritual being who chose matter — who looked at the struggle ahead and decided it was worth engaging. Every human life, however difficult, however painful, is the expression of a pre-natal act of courage.

The fravashi has three relationships with the person it belongs to.

It pre-exists the person: in the spiritual realm, before birth, the fravashi is a complete and perfect expression of the divine qualities its person will embody (or fail to embody) in material life. It accompanies the person: throughout a human life, the fravashi is present as a kind of ideal self, the spiritual version of what the material person is trying to become. And it persists after the person dies: when the body returns to the earth, the fravashi continues in the spiritual realm, its condition shaped by how the material life was lived.

The great Farvardin Yasht catalogs the fravashis of the righteous, listing them by name: the fravashis of Zarathustra and his family, of the great heroes, of the Amesha Spentas, of Ahura Mazda himself. The catalog runs for pages and it is deliberately exhaustive — every significant righteous person from the first human to the coming Saoshyant is named, their fravashi honored, their spiritual presence invoked.

At the end of the year — during the five intercalary days called Gahambars or the Hamaspathmaedaya — the fravashis of the righteous dead return to visit their families.

They come hungry and thirsty. They come looking for recognition. The family sets out food and water and clothing, because the fravashi, having spent its existence inhabiting and then surviving a material body, carries with it the habits of material need even when the material body is gone. The family prays: We remember you. We acknowledge you. You fought well. The fravashi receives this and is nourished by it and goes back to its place in the spiritual realm.

This is not ancestor worship in the usual sense. The fravashi is not a ghost. It is the divine self of the person who has died — the part that was always in the spiritual realm, always divine, now simply no longer accompanied by its material partner. To honor it is to honor the divine in the human.

The Faravahar symbol — the winged disc with a human torso emerging from it, flanked by a ring — is the visual representation of this theology: the winged human rising from the material (the disc, the earth) toward the spiritual, the ring symbolizing the eternal covenant with Ahura Mazda that the fravashi embodies.

It is the most widely recognized symbol of Iranian identity in the modern world. It flies from the gates of Persepolis. It appears on the walls of Zoroastrian fire temples from Yazd to Toronto. Every time it is displayed, it says the same thing: this person is here by choice. This person has a divine counterpart. This person chose the fight.