ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on those two sacraments which can be repeated an unlimited number of times and thereby form the background to the religious life of the pious Zoroastrian. These are penance and the bloodless sacrifice of the yasna and the communion in the sacred elements that accompanies it. Public confession seems to have been the rule in Sassanian Persia, and we possess versions of the Zoroastrian ‘general confession.’ Sin, for the Zoroastrian, means the abandonment of man’s true dignity which consists in his privileged position of being a front-line soldier freely fighting on the side of Ohrmazd against the wickedness of Ahriman, and enlisting on the side of the latter: it is treason. The Haoma rite, however, formed the central part of the Zoroastrian ritual at least from the time of the composition of the younger Avesta.
