Oh, you're back. Good. I was hoping you would be.
Last time we were together, we stood in a museum in Brooklyn and looked at a gilded scroll that had traveled two thousand years to reach us. We talked about a scale, and a feather, and the radical Egyptian idea that how you treat people --- ordinary people, the hungry and the voiceless and the stranger at the gate --- is the only thing that matters when everything else is stripped away.
I have been thinking about that feather ever since.
Because today I want to tell you about something I watched happen slowly, across centuries, that I genuinely did not see coming. And I say that as someone who has been around long enough that very little surprises me anymore.
I come from a world of many gods. You probably know some of them --- my family is, shall we say, colorful. Loud. Quarrelsome. Magnificent in our way, but not exactly models of moral consistency. So when I first heard a human being stand up and say that behind all of it --- behind all the noise and color and chaos of every divine tradition the ancient world had ever produced --- there was just one, I stopped walking and I listened.
I am still listening.
Today I want to take you to Tehran. To a Parsi businessman from Bombay who crossed an empire on a mission of mercy. And through him, all the way back to one of the most astonishing ideas any human mind has ever produced.
I want to take you to Tehran.
Not the Tehran of today --- though it is a remarkable city in its own right --- but Tehran in the winter of 1854. A city of mud-brick walls and bazaars and the complicated, often brutal politics of the Qajar dynasty. A city where the wrong religion could cost you everything. Where the wrong answer to the wrong question from the wrong official could mean a fine you couldn't pay, or a humiliation you couldn't escape, or worse.
Into this city walked a Parsi businessman from Bombay named Maneckji Limji Hataria.
I watched him arrive. He was not a young man --- he was forty-one years old, experienced, self-reliant, and possessed of the particular kind of calm that belongs to people who have decided, somewhere deep inside themselves, that they are going to do what needs to be done regardless of what it costs. He had crossed the Arabian Sea and half a continent on a mission that his community in India had entrusted to him with equal measures of hope and apprehension.
He had come to find what was left of the Zoroastrians of Iran.
What he found broke his heart.
A community that had once been the spiritual backbone of one of the greatest empires the ancient world had ever produced was now scattered across the desert provinces of Yazd and Kerman in conditions of profound poverty and legal humiliation. Their numbers had dwindled to somewhere around seven thousand souls. They were forbidden from riding horses. Forbidden from carrying umbrellas in the rain. Forbidden from building their places of worship taller than the mosques that surrounded them. They paid a tax --- the jizya --- simply for the right to exist as who they were. Murders went unpunished. Abductions went unaddressed.
And still --- and this is the thing that moved me most --- the fires were burning.
Not everywhere. Not as they once had. But in the ancient fire temples of Yazd and Kerman, tended by priests who had memorized prayers in a language their grandchildren could barely speak, the sacred flames that Zarathustra's tradition had kept alight for more than two thousand years were still burning. Quietly. Stubbornly. As if the fire itself had decided it was not finished yet.
Maneckji stood in front of one of those flames and I watched something settle in him. A resolve that was already strong becoming something closer to iron.
He would stay. He would work. He would petition and argue and build and repair and write and lobby and refuse --- absolutely refuse --- to accept that what he was looking at was a community in its final hours.
But to understand why that fire mattered so much --- to understand what Maneckji was actually protecting, and why a flame lit in the ancient world was worth crossing empires to preserve --- we need to go back. Much further back than Tehran. Much further back than the Arab conquest or the Persian Empire or even the oldest fire temple still standing in Yazd.
We need to go back to the moment it was first lit.
Imagine a world before monotheism.
Not a primitive world --- I want to be clear about that, because we have already established together that ancient does not mean unsophisticated. But a world where the divine was understood as many rather than one. Where the forces that shaped human life --- the sun, the storm, the fire, the river, the harvest --- each had their own personality, their own demands, their own moods. Where religion was less about moral alignment and more about negotiation. You made your offerings. You said your prayers. You hoped the gods were listening and that they were, on that particular day, inclined to be generous.
I knew that world intimately. It was, after all, my world.
The ancient Indo-Iranian people --- the ancestors of both the Persians and the Indians --- lived inside a pantheon very much like the one I grew up in. Abundant. Colorful. Morally unpredictable. Their gods were called daeva and their rituals were elaborate and their priests were powerful and the whole magnificent system had been working, more or less, for as long as anyone could remember.
And then one man looked at all of it and said: no.
His name, in the ancient Avestan language of his people, was Zarathustra. We know him in the West mostly by his Greek name --- Zoroaster. When he lived is genuinely debated --- scholars have placed him anywhere from 1500 BCE to 600 BCE, and I will be honest with you, even I find the dating difficult to pin down with certainty. What I can tell you is that the language of his oldest hymns --- the Gathas, which are almost certainly his own words --- is so ancient, so close to the oldest layers of Sanskrit, that most scholars who have spent their lives with these texts believe he was speaking and singing long before the great Abrahamic traditions took their familiar shape.
He was, in other words, very possibly the first.
What Zarathustra said was breathtaking in its simplicity and its audacity. Behind the many gods, behind the noise and the negotiation and the ritual complexity of everything his people had always believed, there was one supreme being. Ahura Mazda --- the Wise Lord. The source of all truth, all light, all goodness. Not one powerful god among many. The one. The source from which everything else flowed.
And Ahura Mazda was not indifferent to how human beings lived. He was not capricious or moody or available to the highest bidder. He was good --- consistently, essentially, irreducibly good --- and he asked human beings to choose goodness freely. Not under compulsion. Not out of fear. But because truth was real and the lie was not, and every soul that had ever lived knew the difference in its deepest place.
Zarathustra gave his entire ethical teaching three words.
Humata. Hukhta. Hvarshta.
Good thoughts. Good words. Good deeds.
I have heard a great many moral frameworks in my time. I have watched civilizations rise and fall on the strength of their ethical foundations. And I will tell you --- six syllables have rarely carried so much weight so gracefully.
The old gods didn't disappear quietly. The daeva --- the divine beings his people had worshipped for generations --- Zarathustra reframed as forces of deception, servants of Angra Mainyu, the principle of the lie that stood in opposition to everything Ahura Mazda represented. This was not a gentle theological adjustment. It was a revolution. A whole world of belief turned inside out by one man who had, by his own account, received a vision so clear and so insistent that he could not keep it to himself.
Did his own people listen immediately? They did not. Tradition holds that Zarathustra spent years preaching before he found his first convert --- his own cousin. He was, in the way of people who arrive with genuinely new ideas, more or less alone for a very long time.
But the idea was too large to stay contained.
It spread through Persia. It became the spiritual foundation of the Achaemenid Empire --- the empire of Cyrus the Great, who would go down in history as one of the most religiously tolerant rulers the ancient world ever produced, a man who freed the Jewish exiles from Babylon and was praised in the Hebrew scriptures as an instrument of divine purpose. The encounter between Zoroastrian and Jewish thought during that period was, I believe, one of the great unacknowledged conversations in the history of religion --- ideas about cosmic justice, about history moving toward a point, about the final renovation of the world, flowing quietly between two traditions that were both, in their own ways, listening for the same thing.
The flame, once lit, traveled further than Zarathustra could possibly have imagined.
I want to stay with that word for a moment.
Choose.
Because that is the word that changes everything in Zarathustra's vision --- and it is easy to walk past it without realizing what it cost him to put it there.
In the ancient world I knew, the relationship between the human and the divine was not really a relationship at all. It was a transaction. You offered the gods what they wanted --- sacrifice, ritual, praise, the right words spoken in the right order at the right time --- and in return they might, if they were feeling generous, give you what you needed. Rain for your crops. Victory in battle. A child. A safe journey. The gods held the power and human beings managed them as best they could.
Zarathustra said something that cut through all of that like a blade.
Ahura Mazda did not want to be managed. He was not waiting to be appeased. What he wanted --- the only thing he wanted, from every human soul that had ever drawn breath --- was a free and genuine choice. Choose truth over the lie. Choose good thoughts over destructive ones. Choose words that build rather than words that wound. Choose actions that move the world toward light rather than away from it.
And then --- here is the part that I find most extraordinary --- he meant everyone. Not just the priests. Not just the nobility. Not just the men. The Gathas, Zarathustra's own hymns, address women and men in equal terms at a moment in history when almost no tradition on earth was doing anything of the kind. Ahura Mazda's invitation was not issued to a selected class of the spiritually qualified. It was issued to every soul capable of making a choice.
Which, Zarathustra insisted, was every soul that existed.
Now --- free will is a concept we take so much for granted today that it barely registers as remarkable. Of course we choose. Of course our choices matter. Of course the universe cares about the difference between a life lived with integrity and a life lived in service of the lie. These ideas are so embedded in the fabric of Western moral and spiritual thought that we absorb them in childhood without ever asking where they came from.
They came from somewhere. And one of the places they came from --- perhaps the earliest place they came from --- was a man on the ancient Iranian plateau who closed his eyes and listened and heard something that rearranged everything.
There is a cosmic struggle, Zarathustra said. Not between two equal and opposing forces --- that is a misreading that has followed Zoroastrianism for centuries, the assumption that Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu are locked in permanent stalemate. That is not what he said. He said truth and the lie are in contest, yes --- but the contest has a direction. History is not a wheel turning endlessly on itself, grinding the same suffering into the same dust in the same cycles forever. History is going somewhere.
He called the destination Frashokereti. The renovation of the world. A moment toward which all of creation was moving --- when truth would finally and completely overcome the lie, when the world would be restored to the perfection it was always meant to embody, when every soul that had ever chosen goodness would find itself at home in a universe finally, fully aligned with Ahura Mazda's original intention.
I remember the first time I really understood what he was saying.
I had watched civilizations rise and fall for a very long time by then. I had seen empires built on the assumption that the powerful would always be powerful and the suffering would always suffer and the wheel would keep turning and nothing would ever fundamentally change. That is a very old and very heavy way to understand the world.
And here was this man saying: no. It is going somewhere. The arc is real. The direction is toward light.
I won't pretend that didn't move me. It did. It still does.
What Zarathustra gave his people --- and through them, in ways that would take centuries to fully unfold, the world --- was not just a theology. It was a reason to keep going. A reason to choose well even when choosing badly was easier. A reason to tend the flame even when the wind was doing everything in its power to extinguish it.
Which brings me back to Tehran. And a man standing in front of a fire that had been burning, against all odds, for thousands of years.
The flame survived.
That is the short version of a very long and very painful story. And I want to honor both the brevity and the pain --- because what the Zoroastrian community endured across fifteen centuries of conquest and pressure and deliberate erasure is not something I can walk past quickly without feeling the weight of it. I was there. I watched it happen. And there were moments --- many moments --- when I was not at all certain the flame was going to make it.
The Achaemenid Empire gave Zoroastrianism its first great flowering. Cyrus the Great, Darius, Xerxes --- these were kings who ruled under the sign of Ahura Mazda, who inscribed his name on their palace walls and their victory monuments, who understood themselves as agents of truth in the cosmic struggle Zarathustra had described. It was Cyrus who freed the Jewish exiles from Babylon in 539 BCE --- an act so extraordinary that the Hebrew scriptures named him as an instrument of divine will, the only non-Jewish figure in the entire Hebrew Bible to be called by that title. The conversation between Zoroastrian and Jewish thought during this period was one of the most quietly consequential exchanges in religious history. Ideas about angels and demons, about cosmic justice, about resurrection, about history moving toward a promised renovation --- these currents ran between two traditions that were both listening for the same deep thing, and both were changed by the encounter.
Then Alexander arrived. And the Parthians. And the Sassanids, who restored Zoroastrianism to imperial prominence and produced some of the most sophisticated theological and literary culture the ancient world had seen. I watched that flowering too, and it was genuinely beautiful --- the fire temples, the sacred texts, the careful preservation of the Avestan language in which Zarathustra had first sung his vision into the world.
And then, in 651 CE, the Arab conquest.
I will not dwell on what followed except to say that it was hard, and it was long, and the people who held on did so at enormous cost. The jizya tax. The restrictions. The slow, grinding pressure of living as a minority in a land that had once been yours, practicing a faith that the dominant culture had decided to regard as inferior. Some left --- making the long journey to India, where they would become the Parsis of Gujarat and Bombay, prosperous and influential and fiercely devoted to the tradition they had carried across the sea. Others stayed. In Yazd. In Kerman. In small villages in the desert provinces of central Iran where the old prayers were still said and the old fires were still tended and the old language was still spoken by the priests even as it faded from everyday use.
Seven thousand souls when Maneckji arrived in 1854. That is what remained of an empire's faith.
And yet.
Maneckji did not see a community in its final hours. He saw a community that had survived fifteen centuries of sustained pressure and was still, stubbornly, itself. He saw the fires still burning. He saw priests who still knew the prayers. He saw families who had passed the tradition from parent to child across generations of hardship without letting it break. And he decided that what this community needed was not a eulogy. It needed schools, and restored fire temples, and legal protection, and someone willing to stand in front of the Qajar Shah and say --- firmly, persistently, for thirty years if necessary --- that these people deserve to exist.
He built twelve schools across Yazd and Kerman and their surrounding villages. He recruited Parsi teachers from India and paid their salaries from funds raised in Bombay. He repaired fire temples. He collected ancient manuscripts --- Avestan texts, Pahlavi commentaries, documents that existed nowhere else in the world --- and sent them to safety in India. He befriended British ambassadors and French diplomats and anyone else who might be persuaded to add their voice to his petitions.
And in August 1882, after thirty years of effort, a Qajar royal decree abolished the jizya tax on Zoroastrians. A tax that had been levied on this community for more than twelve hundred years. Gone. Because one man from Bombay had decided it was unacceptable and had not stopped saying so until someone with the power to act finally listened.
He remained in Tehran until his death in 1890. The flame he had tended was still burning. The communities he had built were still standing. The tax that had humiliated his people for twelve centuries was gone.
Zarathustra had said the arc was real. That history moved toward light.
Maneckji Limji Hataria spent thirty-six years making sure it did.
I want to tell you something about the way we talk about religious history.
We talk about it as a timeline. A sequence of replacements. The old gods gave way to monotheism. Zoroastrianism gave way to Islam in Persia. The Roman pantheon --- my extended family, more or less, under different names --- gave way to Christianity across Europe. Each tradition rising, flourishing, and then being set aside like scaffolding once the next and presumably more advanced structure was ready to stand on its own.
I have been watching this story for a very long time. And I want to tell you, gently but clearly, that the timeline is wrong.
Not wrong in its facts --- the empires rose and fell more or less as the history books describe. But wrong in its understanding of what was actually happening. Because what I watched was not a series of replacements. What I watched was a weaving.
Imagine a tapestry. Not a small one --- an enormous one, the kind that covers an entire wall and takes generations to complete. Every tradition that has ever held a piece of humanity's spiritual attention is a thread in that tapestry. Not a chapter in a book that closes when the next chapter opens. A thread --- present from the moment it enters the loom, woven into everything that comes after it, contributing its particular color and texture and tensile strength to a pattern that no single thread could produce alone.
Zarathustra's thread entered the loom on the ancient Iranian plateau, in a moment I was privileged to witness, and it has never left. I can trace it with my hands through the Hebrew scriptures --- in the figure of Cyrus, in the ideas about angels and resurrection and cosmic justice that deepened during the Babylonian exile. I can trace it through the early development of Christian thought, through Islamic theology's understanding of the divine as essentially and irreducibly good, through the Enlightenment's insistence that history moves toward something rather than simply cycling endlessly. The thread changed color as it traveled. It picked up new textures from every tradition it passed through. But it never broke. It never stopped being itself.
Egypt's thread is there too. You can see it if you look --- the feather of Ma'at, the insistence that every soul regardless of rank or wealth is equally accountable to the moral grain of the universe --- woven into every legal tradition that has ever tried to make justice real rather than merely rhetorical. Every courtroom that presumes innocence. Every declaration that human dignity is not conferred by birth or power but is simply, inherently, already there.
These are not coincidences. They are not parallel developments that happened to resemble each other. They are the same thread, passing through different hands, expressing itself in the language and imagery available to each new generation of weavers.
And here is what moves me most, standing where I stand and seeing what I see.
The tapestry is not finished.
It is still on the loom. Still being woven, right now, in this century, with threads whose full contribution to the pattern we cannot yet see from where we stand. The questions Zarathustra asked --- what is the source of goodness? what does a free soul owe to truth? what does it mean to choose light over darkness in the ordinary moments of an ordinary life? --- are not ancient questions that modern people have answered and set aside. They are the questions we are still living inside, still turning over, still trying to answer with the full seriousness they deserve.
Maneckji Limji Hataria understood this. I think it is why he stayed. Not just because he loved his community --- though he clearly did, with a devotion that cost him everything and that he gave without apparent resentment. But because he understood, at some level that perhaps he couldn't fully articulate, that the thread he was protecting was not only his community's thread. It was humanity's thread. One of the oldest and most luminous filaments in the entire fabric. And if it broke --- if the last fire went out and the last prayer was forgotten and the last manuscript crumbled to dust --- the tapestry would be diminished in ways that no subsequent weaving could fully repair.
He kept it intact. He handed it forward.
And the most beautiful thing I can tell you --- the thing that makes me glad, even now, even after everything I have watched --- is that the thread is still there. The Zoroastrian community in Iran survived. The Parsis in India flourished. The ancient prayers are still said. The fires are still burning in Yazd and Kerman and Mumbai and in quiet homes on every continent where a Zoroastrian family has carried the flame into a new country and a new century and kept it lit on a kitchen shelf or a dedicated hearth because some things are simply too important to let go dark.
Zarathustra said the arc was real.
He was right. I have seen enough of the tapestry now to say so with confidence.
And the most luminous threads --- the ones whose colors we are only beginning to understand, whose contribution to the pattern is still emerging, still finding its place in the whole --- are being woven in right now. Today. In this century. In the hands of people who may not yet realize what they are making.
I find that thought almost unbearably hopeful.
I think you might too.
I want to ask you something.
Not a difficult question. Not a theological one. Just something I find myself returning to, again and again, in the long centuries of watching humanity find its way.
Do you know what thread you are?
I don't mean that abstractly. I mean it personally and practically and with complete seriousness. Every human life that has ever been lived has contributed something to the fabric --- a color, a texture, a tensile strength that was uniquely theirs to offer. Most people never knew they were weaving. They were simply living --- loving their families, doing their work, choosing truth over the lie in small moments that felt unremarkable at the time. And yet the thread went in. And the tapestry holds it still.
Maneckji Limji Hataria knew what thread he was. Not from the beginning --- I doubt he arrived in Tehran in 1854 with a clear vision of everything he would spend the next thirty-six years doing. He knew he was called to serve. He knew the flame mattered. He took the next step, and then the next one, and the shape of his contribution emerged from the accumulated weight of ten thousand ordinary decisions to keep going.
That is how most of the great weavers worked. Not with a grand plan fully formed. But with a direction. A sense of what mattered. A willingness to show up for it even when showing up was costly.
You are living in an extraordinary moment. I know it doesn't always feel that way --- I know it sometimes feels like the opposite of extraordinary, like the noise and the difficulty and the sheer relentlessness of modern life are anything but luminous. But I have seen enough of the tapestry to tell you that the threads being woven right now --- in this century, in this generation, in the lives of people who are simply trying to choose well in the circumstances they find themselves in --- are some of the most remarkable I have ever watched go in.
Zarathustra gave his people three words. Good thoughts. Good words. Good deeds. Not a theology requiring years of study. Not a ritual demanding precise execution. Just a daily practice of choosing --- in the privacy of your own mind, in the words you speak to the people around you, in the actions you take when no one is watching --- to move toward light rather than away from it.
That is still the whole of it. It was always the whole of it.
If you ever find yourself in Yazd --- that ancient desert city in central Iran where Maneckji found the last flickering communities and refused to let them go dark --- there is a fire temple there called the Atash Behram. Inside it, a flame that has been burning continuously for more than fifteen hundred years. Tended by priests who wake before dawn to feed it. Protected by a community that has carried it through everything the world could throw at it and has not, not once, let it go out.
Go and stand in front of it if you can. You don't need to be Zoroastrian. You don't need to say a prayer or understand the ritual or know a single word of Avestan. Just stand there and let it be what it is --- one of the oldest lights humanity has ever kept burning, proof that some things are worth protecting across any distance and any cost.
And then go home and tend your own flame.
Whatever it is. Whatever form it takes in your particular life. The work you do that feels like more than work. The relationships you protect with more care than strictly seems necessary. The values you hold onto even when holding on is inconvenient. The small, daily choice to think well and speak truly and act with the kind of decency that doesn't make headlines but holds the world together.
That is your thread.
And the tapestry needs it.
Before I let you go, I want to sit with something for just a moment.
We began today in Tehran, in 1854, with a man who crossed an empire to protect a flame. We went back further --- much further --- to the ancient Iranian plateau where one extraordinary mind looked at the crowded, chaotic divine world he had inherited and heard, beneath all of it, a single note. One source. One truth. One moral invitation extended to every soul capable of receiving it.
And then we watched that note travel. Through empires and conquests and centuries of pressure and loss. Through the Jewish exiles in Babylon and the fire temples of the Sassanids and the desert communities of Yazd and Kerman who held on when holding on must have seemed almost unreasonable. Through a Parsi businessman from Bombay who decided, quietly and completely, that unreasonable was exactly what the moment required.
The thread held. It is holding still.
Next time I want to take you somewhere that will ask everything we have talked about today to go a little deeper.
Not far from the world Maneckji moved through --- in the mountains and plains of what is now northern Iraq, in the same turbulent decades of the nineteenth century --- there was a community even older, even more misunderstood, and even more stubbornly alive than the one we visited today. They have been called, for centuries, devil worshippers. I want you to know that this is one of the most profound and damaging misunderstandings in the entire history of religion. I was there. I know what they actually believed. And it is not that.
Their faith is ancient --- drawing on threads that reach back through Zoroastrianism and further still, into the oldest spiritual instincts of the human family. Their sacred texts were not written down for centuries because they trusted something older than writing --- the living human voice, passing truth from generation to generation in songs and prayers that their children memorized before they could read.
And in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire was doing what empires do to the communities it found inconvenient, this people found their guardian in the most unexpected of forms.
A woman.
Her name was Meyan Khatun. She was a Yazidi princess --- and then a regent --- and then simply, for more than four decades, the person who held her community together by the force of her character and the depth of her devotion when everything around her was coming apart. She led through exile and persecution and the slow violent unraveling of the world she had been born into, and she did not flinch. Not once, as far as I could see.
I have always had a particular admiration for people who simply refuse to let their communities disappear. I have introduced you to a few of them on this journey we are taking together. Meyan Khatun belongs in that company without question.
I cannot wait to tell you her story.
Until then --- remember the flame. Remember the thread. Remember that the tapestry is still on the loom and that your particular contribution to it is needed, is real, and is more luminous than you probably believe on an ordinary Tuesday morning.
Choose well. Speak truly. Act with the decency that holds the world together.
It was always the whole of it.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.