Quoted By:
>TERRIBLE LIE
>I needed to know everything there was to know about the beliefs, customs and devotional worship of the Zoroastrians. I needed to know whether it had been their teachings, or those of the Magi priesthood of Media, that provided the knowledge for the Judaic understanding of angelology, and in particular the story concerning the fall of the Watchers
>Books could provide me only with background information, and I realized I needed much more. I also needed direct contact with this living religion, which still existed as a faith in certain parts of India, mostly around Bombay. It was to here that tens of thousands of Zoroastrians migrated from Persia during the ninth century AD in the hope of escaping the increasing persecutions of the Arab invaders. In India the Zoroastrians were called Parsees - the people ofpars, or Persia - and it is by this name that they are still known to the outside world
>I also discovered that at the beginning of the twentieth century a community of Zoroastrians established themselves in London, and here erected a temple of worship which remains in use today. I had obtained their address from a friend, and, after various letters and telephone calls in which I put forward my interest in the subject, was rather reluctantly invited to attend one of their seasonal services at the London address. The Zoroastrians' cloak of secrecy was totally understandable. The ignorant had always seen their beliefs, customs and worship as, at best, non-Christian, pagan and archaic in the extreme, while over the centuries the Muslims of both Iran and India had systematically attempted to eradicate their faith completely. Since the fall of the Shah's Pahlavi regime in 1979, those Zoroastrians still remaining in Iran had been forced either to flee the country or to worship in seclusion away from the eyes of the Islamic authorities. This was why Zoroastrian House in London was surrounded by so much secrecy
