“Back on track
Paddywhack
No need to hit the road Jack
Come back, come back, come back
Get in the sack
And don’t be slack
Love rides life in a piggy-back
Charm attack,
Wolf from the pack
Vultures killed by Diclofenac
Yakkety Yackety Yackety Yack
I love the girl with the spherical stack”
From Showcase Mey Itna tho Godown Mey Kitna? by Bachchoo
My Dear fellow Parsis,
Firstly, congratulations to the Parsis of Kolkata, for once again demonstrating the civilised response of our great and good community. I note that your response to American hip-hopper Snoop Doggy Dogg’s video displaying the “Fravahar” has not been a fatwa of death or an invasion of the record company’s offices armed with Kalashnikovs. You have taken the path of moderation and applied to an Indian court to ban the video.
My sincere advice would be to withdraw the case. It has and will increase the international viewership of Snoopy’s video, just as the attempt to ban Lady Chatterley’s Lover projected the book as an all-time bestseller and the fatwa sold millions of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. I confess that I make an effort to acquire banned stuff out of natural curiosity and perverse instincts. Besides, videos are free and a Kolkata court will, like our Achaemenid Emperor Xerxes, who (according to the lying Greek historians) ordered the unruly waves of the Hellespont to be whipped, fail in its attempt to suppress it. I further confess to not sharing the Kolkata indignation. I disagree with Kolkata for several reasons — theological, historical and cultural.
Let’s begin with the theological and then proceed to the theo-historical (Wow!): the figure that Dogg has made famous in the “offending” video is what we Zoroastrians call the “Fravahar”. The figure first appears in Bisotun on an inscription of Emperor Darius who mentions his devotion to Ahura Mazda several times. It has been assumed by many historians, including the great R.Z. Zaehner, that this human figure in the circle with wings is a depiction of Ahura Mazda. If that is so, then using an image of God to decorate the set of a video that isn’t strictly devoted to matters eschatological is, at the least, bad taste, and at worst blasphemy. Blasphemy is punished as a sin. Joan of Arc was, so to speak, fired. The Zoroastrian preachers Mani and Mazdak were declared blasphemers by the Dasturs of Sasanian times and executed.
The Sunni fanatics of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are even today beheading and crucifying people for what they denounce as blasphemy. Zoroastrians stopped the chopping some centuries ago, leaving it to God to strike the guilty down with bolts of lightning, with slippery banana skins or other divine weapons. However, Herodotus, the father of history, very clearly says that the Achaemenids, the Persian Zoroastrians of his time, unlike the Greeks, did not anthropomorphise their God. In other words, Ahura Mazda was not as were Zeus, etc., ever portrayed in human form. Historians, today, don’t believe the figure in the winged chariot is Ahura Mazda. He is a spirit, an angel or someone who intercedes between humans and the unfathomable divine.
In fact, some historians trace the figure back to pre-monotheistic times when the pre-Zoroastrians worshipped the Sun — which is the circle given wings and an emergent human form. The Assyrians represented the circle with wings, the Sun of the heavens, as Shamash, who was also the God of justice. Still others say the winged figure represents the “Xwarenah” or the divine glory of Darius the King.
These several uncertainties are, to my mind, a good defence for Snoop Doggy and for the Iranian-American singer Amitis with whom he shares the song or piece for which the video is made. I don’t know if Amitis is a fellow Zoroastrian or whether she is one of the scantily clad women who dance in front of the “Fravahar” symbol suspended above the throne on which Dogg sits. The video depicts people smoking hookahs, presumably with stronger material than tobacco in them.
Allow me then to venture an artistic, as opposed to an outraged, critique of the video. As every good Parsi knows the prophet, Zarathustra, had strong words to say about the sacrificing of bulls and the orgiastic consumption of the exhilarating Haoma. Though modern Parsis don’t sacrifice bulls they, symbolically at least, partake of the rite of Haomo. I imagine the original rite about which the prophet had strong words, to be something like the sight Moses encountered when he came down from the mountain with the 10 Commandments. He was carrying these engraved stones when he saw his followers dancing around a golden calf in orgiastic revelry. My suspicion is that Dogg, a Christian, drew his inspiration from this Old Testament scene.
Dogg has cast himself as Moses, hence the throne. The dancers are the revellers around the calf, consumers of the equivalent of Haoma and the “Xwarenah” above him represents the authority of Zoroastrianism, the first monotheistic religion, passing on to this Doggy proto-Moses. Every Parsi also knows that when Jesus’ apostle Matthew writes in the gospel that three Zoroastrian Magi came to Jesus’ birth with gifts to anoint him, he is seeking the same authority. If Zoroastrian priests declared the divinity of Jesus that would make it certain.
Some of you will dismiss this interpretation as fanciful and I doubt if Dogg will read it and rush to endorse it saying “yes, that’s precisely what I meant to convey and thank you Mr D for your insightful articulation, in consequence of which 32 per cent of the earnings from the video will be deposited in your off-shore bank account”. Unlikely. But still, thanks to Dogg Zoroastrianism will now be seen by millions as “cool” — a term of approval in the Doggy world. So brothers and sisters remember: Good thoughts, good words and good deeds. Not good court cases and censorship.
I remain,
Yours in the grace of Ahura Mazda, Et cetera.
