Chapter 6: Margins and Majorities - When Smaller Faiths Face the Fire

This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Texts.

"The sacred is not always mighty. And the small are often left to burn."

Zoroastrianism, once the dominant faith of the Persian empire, held the fire as sacred—both symbol and sanctuary. Its priests, the magi, recited complex liturgies from the Avesta, a corpus of hymns, prayers, and ritual instructions passed through both oral and written traditions.

But when the Arab armies conquered Persia in the 7th century CE, the Zoroastrian priesthood fractured. Temples were repurposed or destroyed, libraries looted, and the social infrastructure for transmitting the Avesta was weakened, then eroded.¹

What was lost is immeasurable. Of the original Avesta, which tradition claims once filled 21 volumes, only about a quarter survives—preserved in later redactions or orally retained among the priestly class. The rest, Zoroastrians believe, was burned, lost, or forgotten.

Later, during waves of persecution, many Zoroastrians fled to India. There, the Parsis (literally "from Persia") rebuilt communities—but in doing so, focused their efforts on practical ritual and legal texts, often neglecting more cosmological or poetic works. Transmission narrowed further.

The fire still burns in Parsi temples. But many of the songs once sung around it are silent.

In the 16th century, Spanish friars arrived in the Yucatán Peninsula with the cross in one hand and fire in the other. Among them was Bishop Diego de Landa, who viewed indigenous Maya religion as satanic and its scriptures as demonic invention.

In 1562, de Landa oversaw an auto-da-fé in the city of Maní. There, he ordered the burning of dozens—perhaps hundreds—of Mayan codices: bark-paper books covered in hieroglyphs that recorded astronomy, medicine, ritual calendars, and myths. "We found a large number of books," he wrote, "and since they contained nothing but superstitions and lies of the devil, we burned them all."²

Only four Mayan codices are known to survive. They were not translated in time. Most Mayan scribes were killed or converted. Oral transmission faltered under colonial rule. Today, much of the pre-Columbian Maya intellectual tradition—one of the most advanced of the ancient world—is lost, not by accident but by deliberate, theologically motivated erasure.

In the Arctic regions of northern Europe, the Sámi people maintained a rich tradition of yoiks—sacred songs that encoded spiritual relationships with the landscape, ancestors, and reindeer herds. Christian missionaries systematically suppressed these chants as pagan superstition, often burning the drums and sacred objects that accompanied them. Many yoiks vanished entirely, taking with them irreplaceable knowledge about Arctic ecology and indigenous cosmology.³

Across sub-Saharan Africa, the Aka pygmy communities of Central Africa preserved complex polyphonic chants that encoded forest knowledge, hunting practices, and spiritual beliefs. Colonial disruption, deforestation, and cultural displacement have threatened these oral traditions, with entire song cycles disappearing as elder knowledge holders pass away without successors.⁴

In August 2014, ISIS launched a brutal campaign against the Yazidi people of northern Iraq. Thousands were killed or enslaved. Entire villages were emptied. Religious sites—shrines, cemeteries, libraries—were targeted for destruction.

The Yazidis possess a small but vital set of sacred texts, including the Mishafa Reş (Black Book) and Kitêba Cilwe (Book of Revelation), as well as a vast oral tradition of hymns (qewls), stories, and ritual laws passed down through hereditary caste lines.

ISIS aimed not just to eliminate Yazidis physically, but spiritually—to sever the transmission of memory. In some cases, this memory survived because it was held in song, in ritual gestures, in the lips of elderly women. In other cases, the community turned to technology—recording recitations, uploading them to diaspora-run servers, preserving what the attackers tried to erase.⁵

But even today, many Yazidis debate: what was forgotten? What songs will never be sung again?

These stories illustrate a brutal truth: minority religions often face greater existential risk in times of conflict, colonization, and modern neglect. When a tradition lacks political protection, global awareness, or institutional infrastructure, its texts can vanish with terrifying speed. The world rarely notices until it is too late.

Even in peace, preservation tends to favor the large, the well-funded, the already-translated. Hinduism and Christianity have UNESCO projects and manuscript archives. Zoroastrianism does not. Maya glyph studies remain underfunded. Yazidi liturgy was almost undocumented before the 2000s.

What's worse: even when digitized, these traditions often depend on majority-owned platforms—Google, Meta, YouTube—for access and survival. If those platforms change policies, delete accounts, or collapse, the knowledge may disappear again. In the digital age, the logic remains: the margins must fight to stay remembered.

Among the Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, ancient Gnostic texts written in Mandaic Aramaic preserve unique early Christian and pre-Islamic traditions. Political instability, sectarian violence, and mass emigration have scattered this small community worldwide, making the transmission of their complex liturgical traditions increasingly difficult. Without a critical mass of practicing priests, entire ritual cycles face extinction.⁶

Had these smaller traditions received the same preservation resources as dominant faiths, religious history might be far more pluralistic today. The Avesta includes hymns on justice, cosmology, and moral choice that influenced Greek thought and Abrahamic traditions. If more of it had survived, modern discourse on ethics and environmental stewardship might include Zoroastrian principles as central texts. Scholar Jenny Rose argues that what was lost was "an entire worldview centered on order, truth, and ecological balance."⁷

Mayan codices contained complex astronomical data—eclipses, planetary cycles, calendar systems. If those had been studied alongside Babylonian and Greek texts, they might have reshaped the history of science. Elizabeth Hill Boone notes that "we lost not only ritual knowledge, but a highly developed science of time."⁸

Had Yazidi sacred texts been widely documented before the genocide, post-crisis recovery might have included robust educational resources, liturgical revival, and broader interfaith recognition. Instead, survivors have had to reconstruct memory from fragmentary oral accounts. Khanna Omarkhali emphasizes that "we are witnessing a race against forgetting."⁹

If Sámi yoiks and other Arctic oral traditions had been preserved alongside their ecological knowledge, they might have contributed significantly to contemporary environmental science and indigenous approaches to climate adaptation. The loss of these songs represents not just spiritual impoverishment but the disappearance of sophisticated traditional ecological knowledge.

Contemporary scholars offer varying perspectives on the preservation challenges facing minority religious traditions. Maria Dakake argues that minority communities often embody more resilient oral cultures precisely because they lack written dominance. But she cautions that such resilience cannot withstand targeted annihilation or systematic cultural disruption.¹⁰

Elizabeth Hill Boone sees colonial erasure as epistemicide—a killing not just of people, but of ways of knowing. She calls for preservation efforts to be coupled with restitution and community empowerment, rather than extractive archiving by outside institutions.¹¹

Khanna Omarkhali champions community-led digitization, warning against "extractive archiving" by Western institutions that collect without returning access or control. She emphasizes the ethical imperative of empowering the tradition itself, ensuring that preservation efforts serve the community's needs rather than external scholarly interests.¹²

Jenny Rose contends that major world religions have a moral responsibility to assist minority faiths in preservation—especially when they share historical entanglements. "The fire doesn't only consume the small," she writes. "But the small have fewer places to hide."¹³

Today, the digital tools that could save minority scriptures—mobile scanning, audio archiving, distributed backups—are often out of reach. The threats remain: climate instability, geopolitical conflict, shrinking elder communities, and the continued marginalization of non-dominant traditions.

Organizations like the Endangered Languages Project work to document disappearing oral traditions, while institutions such as the Archive of Traditional Music at Indiana University preserve recordings of indigenous songs and chants. The Digital Himalaya Project documents Tibetan and Himalayan cultural traditions, including those of smaller Buddhist and Bon communities. But the scale of need far exceeds available resources.¹⁴

And with each lost chant, each untranslated manuscript, the world becomes spiritually poorer. The canon of world religion is not just what we inherited. It is what we failed to protect. And every minority tradition that falls into silence is a signal to all others.

The margins must be remembered. Not just for their sake, but for ours.

Notes

Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 1979), 84-91. The account of Arab conquest effects on Zoroastrian institutions is documented in multiple Persian and Arabic historical sources.
Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (1566), trans. William Gates (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), 78-80.
Veli-Pekka Lehtola, The Sámi People: Traditions in Transition (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004), 89-103.
Michelle Kisliuk, Seize the Dance!: BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 156-178.
Khanna Omarkhali, The Yezidi Religious Textual Tradition, from Oral to Written: Categories, Transmission, Scripturalisation, and Canonisation of the Yezidi Oral Religious Texts (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017), 15-37.
Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 123-145.
Jenny Rose, Zoroastrianism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 101-122.
Elizabeth Hill Boone, "Writing and Recording Knowledge," in Maya Ideologies of the Sacred, ed. David Carrasco (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 35-58.
Omarkhali, Yezidi Religious Textual Tradition, 88-102.
Maria Dakake, "The Hidden Spiritual Lives of Minority Communities," Interfaith Studies Journal 12, no. 2 (2020): 44-66.
Elizabeth Hill Boone, "Epistemicide and Sacred Erasure," in Colonial Afterlives: Postcolonial Theory and the Study of Religion, ed. C. Desjarlais (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 201-223.
Omarkhali, Yezidi Religious Textual Tradition, 203-218.
Rose, Zoroastrianism, 123-130.
For contemporary preservation efforts, see the Endangered Languages Project at endangeredlanguages.com, the Archive of Traditional Music at Indiana University (indianafolk.com), and the Digital Himalaya Project at digitalhimalaya.com.

Notes

Further Reading