Jahi

Ahriman lay senseless for three thousand years. His demons came to him one by one and described the wreck they meant to make of the good creation, and none of it brought him round. Then Jahi spoke, and the Bundahishn says he rose.

He kissed her on the head. The pollution that Zoroastrian tradition calls menstruation appeared in her at that moment, and the story holds that it has marked women since.

Two figures share the name, and about a thousand years separate them. In the Avesta, the oldest layer of Zoroastrian scripture, the jahī is a woman, and usually one of two kinds: the adulteress, or the woman who has stopped bearing children. In the Pahlavi books of the ninth and tenth centuries, Jeh has become a demoness with a defined role in Ahriman’s assault on fertile creation. The distance between those two figures traces how the tradition shifted from policing human conduct to defining a cosmic adversary.

Appearance

Zoroastrian tradition does not depict its demons, and no image of Jahi survives from antiquity. Her portrait has to be assembled from what the texts say she does.

Her gaze comes first. In the Vendidad, the look of the jahī dries up one-third of the mighty floods that run down from the mountains and withers one-third of the plants. Her touch withers one-third of a faithful man’s good thoughts. Ahura Mazda names her as the creature that causes him the sorest grief, and the Avesta ranks her for destruction ahead of the gliding snake and the wolf at the fold. The Vendidad, the Avestan law book, lists her among the things a righteous man is expected to kill on sight.

The Denkard adds smell. Its summary of the lost Sudgar nask reports that fire itself is sickened by her stench and her filth, and the passage it quotes is domestic: a woman rests a knee against the fire-stand and arranges her curls, and damp falls from her head. The threat being described is a woman in a room, close to the hearth.

The Bundahishn gives her one physical feature. Ahriman’s kiss leaves the daxšta, the mark, a word the tradition uses both for the stain of menstruation and for the menstruant herself. The texts name the mark and leave it at that. The same scene describes Ahriman, and here the two translations diverge in a way that changes who is standing in the room. E. W. West’s rendering has Ahriman’s form appear to Jahi as a young man of fifteen. Behramgore Anklesaria’s translation of the Greater Bundahishn has Ohrmazd reveal Ahriman’s astral body to her in that same shape and fix her thought on it. Either way she looks at the young man and asks for the love of men, which he grants.

Function

The word carries one job in the Avesta and a different one in the Pahlavi books.

In the older layer the tone is legal and medical. The jahī is a category of woman who damages the creation by being near it: her look drains the rivers, her touch spoils the good thoughts of the man who comes into contact with her. In the Haoma hymn the worshipper spurns the polluting jahī who sits at the offering and drinks it. The Ashi hymn has Fortune complaining that a jahī has shamed her. The Vendidad names the primal bull as the creature “whom the Jahi kills”, with Ahriman alongside her. Nothing in this layer calls her a demon. The word means woman, and it means the kind of woman who is dangerous to have around.

By the ninth century the tradition had promoted her. The Bundahishn puts her in the room at the turning point of the cosmos, where she succeeds with a sentence where an army of demons failed with a catalogue. The Selections of Zadspram makes her Jēh-dēw, the demon Whore, appointed by Ahriman for the defilement of females and called his queen. She leads a band of demonesses whose work is the corruption of women and, through them, of men. In the same tradition she stands as the exact opposite of Anahita, the yazata whose epithet is “undefiled”, who purifies the seed of males and the wombs of females and keeps the seed of the world’s future saviours safe.

Then the law follows the story. The tradition treats menses as a periodic illness caused by Ahriman, since every bodily discharge violates the wholeness of the person. A woman in that state, called bīnamāz, withdrew to a small dark hut, the daštānistān, set fifteen paces from fire and water and three paces from anywhere men passed. She wore old clothes and no ornaments. Her food came on metal plates, and she washed with bull’s urine rather than water. The confinement ran three days at minimum and nine at most. Sex with a menstruating woman ranked among the gravest sins a man could commit, and the Vendidad sets out the expiation in full.

The counterweight matters more than the rules. James R. Russell records in his Encyclopaedia Iranica article on the bīnamāzī that a girl’s first menses was celebrated by her family as her entrance into womanhood, and that no sense of guilt or original sin attached to women. A menstruating woman was understood as afflicted by Ahriman, in the same way the tradition held that every righteous person is afflicted in this age of Mixture, before the final renovation. The law worked as ritual quarantine, maintained alongside the family’s celebration of a girl’s first menses.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The etymology is the entry point into the scholarship, and Albert de Jong’s article on Jeh for the Encyclopaedia Iranica is where the argument is clearest. He notes that the name “is commonly, but with little justification, translated as whore”. The Avestan word appears in the plain expression nā jahika, “man or woman”, and the Khotanese cognate jsicā- means “girl”. The pejorative senses attach to particular women rather than to the word itself, and Middle Persian jeh is a learned borrowing from Avestan that never entered ordinary Persian speech at all. It survived only inside Zoroastrian texts.

Shai Secunda pushed the same point further in 2014. Reading Videvdad 16, the chapter that lays out the menstrual laws in full, he observed that the menstruating woman “is never once described in misogynistic or demonological terms”. The demons in the chapter appear only as a factor in one special case, an unusually long flow, and Videvdad 1.17-18 treats only irregular menses as a demonic counter-creation. Secunda then reconstructed what he calls an ancient Iranian mythological complex about the harmful eye of menstruants, and traced it from the Avesta into late antiquity, where it met similar beliefs in neighbouring traditions. On that reading, the demonization is a late antique development. It happens in the Pahlavi books, and it happens to a word that had meant something simpler.

Zaehner built a larger thesis on her. In Zurvan (1955) and The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (1961) he made Jahi, “the Primal Whore”, a central witness for the claim that Zurvanism taught that woman was a creature of Ahriman. His evidence was the difference between the Bundahishn and a parallel version preserved by the Syriac theologian Theodore bar Koni in the eighth or ninth century, in which women defect to the Evil Spirit themselves and are rewarded, with no demoness standing in for them. De Jong’s essay “Jeh the Primal Whore? Observations on Zoroastrian Misogyny” (1995) and Shaul Shaked’s work on the Zurvan myth took the construct apart. De Jong also proposed that bar Koni had mixed the Zoroastrian story of Jeh with the Manichaean story of the archons seduced by the Third Messenger, a reading that makes the Syriac version a later composite rather than an older witness. The figure at the centre of the argument about Zoroastrian misogyny turns out to rest on a text that may be reporting somebody else’s myth.

The neighbours worth reading alongside her fall into two groups. In her own tradition she belongs with Zurvan, the god the same priesthood worked to erase from the Bundahishn that names her, and with Div-e Sepid, the Persian dēw descended from the Avestan daeva, the same reversal that turned the Vedic deva into a demon. Peri comes from the pairika, another class of seductive female beings catalogued in the Vendidad as threats and later demoted or promoted depending on which tradition got hold of them. Across cultures, Churel carries the same idea from the other end: a woman who dies during menstruation returns as a monster, so the biological event marks her as dangerous even in death. Disani belongs here because of the room. The Nuristani bashali and the Zoroastrian daštānistān answer the same description, a separate house where a woman goes when she is bleeding, kept away from the fire and from the men.

Modern Survival

The purity law outlived the empire that made it. Parsis in Bombay slept on separate metal cots and ate from separate metal vessels, and a woman kept away from the fire while the mark lasted. Russell recorded in the Encyclopaedia Iranica that Zoroastrian women in Iran sometimes declined to travel to a shrine of pilgrimage in case their period began while they were there. The rules softened with the century. Secunda observed in 2014 that a good number of modern Zoroastrians no longer hold that a menstruating woman’s gaze is harmful, or that she is impure at all.

The dispute has moved into court. In April 2019 the Delhi Parsi Anjuman told the Delhi High Court that menstruating women are barred from entering the Fire Temple, in an affidavit answering a petition that also sought the ordination of Zoroastrian women as priests. The trust described the exclusion as “a core, essential and unalterable part/tenet of Zoroastrianism” and argued that it is not gender discrimination, since a Zoroastrian man who is bleeding from an injury is excluded on the same grounds. The temple is privately endowed under a trust of 1959, the trust said, so nobody outside the community has a right to demand entry. The court heard the question of whether the petition could be maintained. No final ruling was reported. The rule the trust is defending is the quarantine that Jahi’s kiss is said to have set in motion.

She also reached the English-speaking world through a reference book. The New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, in the Persian chapter written by Paul Masson-Oursel and Louise Morin, compressed her whole story into two sentences. The first carries the weight: “The vices to which women are subject were incorporated in the druj Jahi: a kiss which Ahriman once gave her introduced into the world the impurity of menstruation.” The second reads “Jahi furnished Milton with the prototype of Guilt.” That comparison has travelled a long way. Nothing in Paradise Lost names her, and the encyclopedia gives no source for the link. It reads as an aside from the book’s two authors, and it has outlived most of the scholarship written about her since.

The name itself went quiet. Jeh never became a Persian word for anything, and modern Persian does not have it. It survives in the Sad Dar and a handful of Zoroastrian texts that kept the Middle Persian vocabulary, which is why the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry has to spend its first paragraph persuading readers that the usual English translation is wrong.

What remains open is the question de Jong’s essay opened. The Avesta treats the jahī as a woman who damages creation by looking at it. The Pahlavi books treat Jeh as the demon who invented the damage and passed it to every woman after her. Which layer belongs to Zarathustra’s own reform and which to the Sasanian priesthood that systematized the tradition a thousand years later is still argued. The Denkard gives its answer as an image: a woman by the fire-stand with her curls and the damp on her head, and a fire too sick to burn.

Sources

• Avesta, Vendidad Fargard 18.61-65 and Fargard 21.1; Yasna 10.15; Yasht 3.9 and 17.57-58. Translated by James Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 4, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880
• Bundahishn, chapters III-IV. Translated by E. W. West, Pahlavi Texts, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 5, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880
• Zand-Akasih: Iranian or Greater Bundahishn, chapter IV. Translated by Behramgore Tehmuras Anklesaria, Bombay: Rahnumae Mazdayasnan Sabha, 1956
• Wizidagiha i Zadspram (Selections of Zadspram) 34.30-31. Translated by E. W. West, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 5; critical edition by Philippe Gignoux and Ahmad Tafazzoli, Anthologie de Zadspram, Paris, 1993
• Denkard 7.3.2 and Denkard 9.1.10.6 (summary of the lost Sudgar nask)
• Shayest ne Shayest 3.29
• Albert de Jong, “Jeh,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 14, 2008, last updated 2012
• Albert de Jong, “Jeh the Primal Whore? Observations on Zoroastrian Misogyny,” in R. Kloppenborg and W. J. Hanegraaff (eds.), Female Stereotypes in Religious Traditions, Studies in the History of Religions 66, Leiden: Brill, 1995, pp. 15-41
• James R. Russell, “Binamazi i. In Zoroastrianism,” Encyclopaedia Iranica
• Richard Charles Zaehner, Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, pp. 183-192 and 350-359
• Richard Charles Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961
• Shai Secunda, “The Fractious Eye: On the Evil Eye of Menstruants in Zoroastrian Tradition,” Numen 61, no. 1 (2014), pp. 83-108. DOI 10.1163/15685276-12341302
• Emile Benveniste, “Le Temoignage de Theodore bar Konai sur le zoroastrisme,” Le Monde oriental 26 (1932)
• Shaul Shaked, “The Myth of Zurvan,” 1992
• S. K. Mendoza Forrest, with Prods O. Skjaervo, Witches, Whores, and Sorcerers: The Concept of Evil in Early Iran, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011
• Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina, “Purity and Polemics: Zoroastrian Women’s Bodies as Sites of Difference and Contestation in Early Islamic Iran,” Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, 2021. DOI 10.1080/05786967.2021.1945421
• Paul Masson-Oursel and Louise Morin, “Mythology of Ancient Persia,” in Felix Guirand (ed.), New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, translated by Richard Aldington and Delano Ames, New York: Crescent Books, 1959
• “Menstruating Women Not Allowed In Fire Temple: Delhi Parsi Anjuman,” NDTV, 13 April 2019