Visperad

Visperad^{[pronunciation?]} or Visprad or Vispered is either a particular Zoroastrian religious ceremony or the name given to a passage collection within the greater Avesta compendium of texts.

Overview

The Visperad ceremony "consists of the rituals of the Yasna, virtually unchanged, but with a liturgy extended by twenty-three^[a] supplementary sections."^[1] These supplementary sections (kardag) are then – from a philological perspective – the passages that make up the Visperad collection. The standard abbreviation for Visperad chapter-verse pointers is Vr., though Vsp. may also appear in older sources.

Name

The name Visperad is a contraction of Avestan vispe ratavo,^[b] with an ambiguous meaning. Subject to how ratu is translated,^[c] vispe ratavo may be translated as "(prayer to) all patrons"^[2] or "all masters"^[1] or the older and today less common "all chiefs."^[3] or "all lords."

Text

The Visperad collection has no unity of its own, and is never recited separately from the Yasna. During a recital of the Visperad ceremony, the Visperad sections are not recited en bloc but are instead interleaved into the Yasna recital.^[4] The Visperad itself exalts several texts of the Yasna collection, including the Ahuna Vairya and the Airyaman ishya, the Gathas, and the Yasna Haptanghaiti (Visperad 13–16, 18–21, 23-24^[5]) Unlike in a regular Yasna recital, the Yasna Haptanghaiti is recited a second time between the 4th and 5th Gatha (the first time between the 1st and 2nd as in a standard Yasna). This second recitation is performed by the assistant priest (the raspi), and is often slower and more melodious.^[4] In contrast to barsom bundle of a regular Yasna, which has 21 rods (tae), the one used in a Visperad service has 35 rods.

Ceremony

Main article: Yasht i Visperad

The text of the Visperad is used during the Visperad ceremony, also known in Middle Persian as Yasht i Visperad or Jesht-i Visperad.^[6] This means it is a Yasna, known in Middle Persian as Yasht, which includes a worship of all the ratus. The Visperad ceremony has a strong connection to yearly Zoroastrian festivals known as Gahambars, and it may have been created as an "extended service" for that occastion.^[6]

As seasonal festivals, the gahambars are dedicated to the Amesha Spentas, the divinites that are in tradition identified with specific aspects of creation, and through whom Ahura Mazda realized ("with his thought") creation. These "bounteous immortals" (amesha spentas) are the "all patrons" – the vispe ratavo – who apportion the bounty of creation. However, the Visperad ceremony itself is dedicated to Ahura Mazda, the ratūm berezem "high Master."^[6]

Notes

a)^	Subject to translation, there may be either 23 or 24 sections.[7] Karl Friedrich Geldner has 24, Mills has 23.
b)^	vīspe ratavō[8] in the Geldner/Bartholomae transliteration scheme, vīspe ratauuō[2] in the Hoffmann scheme.
c)^	the stem rat- is literally "to (ap)portion," (from base ar- "to get" and "to cause to get, give") with the matter being portioned ranging from time (ratav, a segment of time) to material goods (cf. Kellens'[2] ratu "patron") and justice (ratu then being a "judge," and ratav then being a judicial ruling). For the various meanings of ratav, see Bartholomae 1904, cols. 1498-1504.