Purity Laws
Maintaining ritual purity as essential to righteous living.
Zoroastrianism emphasizes purity. Pollution comes from death, disease, and certain bodily functions. Purification rituals restore purity. These laws protect the sacred elements from contamination.
Purity is the best good; happiness to the pure.
Purity laws are extensively detailed in the Vendidad.
Avesta
Written about in
- What Zoroastrianism says about illness and the body failing
Here the tradition is hard to defend: pollution is said to come from death, disease and certain bodily functions. Treating sickness as a source of contamination lays a burden on the sick that sits badly beside Haurvatat, and the answer offered is purification ritual rather than any admission that the pollution was never real.