HAPPY NOW ROUZ - PERSIAN NEW YEAR - 1ST DAY OF SPRING

March 20th, 2010

Zoroastrian Festival

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Best wishes to all our visitors
Persian and Otherwise

FYI - VERY PRE-ISLAMIC
Mullahs have tried to suppress it being celebrated. Should tell you something.


This basically Zoroastrian religious festival of “renewal” arriving in Spring, has three main tenets in its religion:


Think good thoughts (pendaar-e neek), speak good words (goftaar-e neek) and do good deeds (kerdaar-e neek).

 

While “worshipping” Light (goodness), this religion has a good force of light and an equal evil force of darkness, which like Yin and Yang follow each other in a constant struggle personified by night and day.

 

There are various customs which have originated with this, including the last Wednesday of the year (Chaharshanbe Souri) where small bonfires are made of dried bushes similar to our Tumbleweed and Persians traditionally jump over a string of these and chant to the fires:

 

“May my redness (good health) be derived from you into me and your yellowness (poor health or situation) from me (pulled out of me into your flames)”

 

The Mullahs have banned this custom as pure superstition (as opposed to the string of these in Islam) but Persians flouted the ban and there were clashes between celebrants and Mullah Suppression forces all across the country. Videos of theser are hard to distinguish as cell phones do not make good video cameras at night.

A couple of better such videos can be seen at:

 

http://farsiposts.blogspot.com/2010/03/blog-post_18.html

 

Then on the 13th day after Nowrouz, Persian families leave home and go into the countryside for mass picnics.

 

There unmarried girls tie knots in blades of grass to ask for a suitor to come their way.

 

Prior to NowRuz families also symbolically sprout wheat in dishes and take these out on the picnics and try to find running water into which they throw these.

 

Some say to get rid of life’s evil this way but as probably to “seed” the banks and distant reaches of the river with wheat that can then spread far and wide and grow into food sources.