The Ferruhars are the lowest of Zarathustra's three orders of serving spirits, the spiritual reality behind material appearance and the guides of animal group souls.
The Ferruhars in Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner gave to the third and lowest of the three orders of serving spirits that Zarathustra ranked beneath Ormuzd and Ahriman. Steiner set them out in his Berlin lecture of 19 January 1911, published in GA 60, Answers of Spiritual Science to the Great Questions of Existence. Above them stand the twelve Amschaspands, who carry the light forces of the zodiac, and below those the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izeds. The Ferruhars, whom the English translation also calls Frawaschars and whom Steiner's German names Fravashis after the Avestan fravaši, work least directly on human tendencies. They are the spiritual element that permeates the great macrocosm, the reality standing behind everything we take for merely external and material, and they hold the group souls of the animal kingdom under their guidance. Today the term anchors Anthroposophy's reading of Zoroastrian cosmology to Iranian philology.
The Ferruhars are the quietest rank in Zarathustra's spirit hierarchy, and for Steiner the most far-reaching. Where the Amschaspands govern the light streaming through the zodiac and the Izeds work into the animal kingdom, the Ferruhars are what is actually there behind the sense world. Steiner also placed the group souls of animals under their care, and traced their echo in human thinking that rises above brain-bound cognition.
In Steiner's Own Words
Again, subservient to these Amschaspand entities, according to Zarathustranism, are yet lower orders of spiritual powers or forces, among which some twenty-eight separate types are usually distinguished. These are the so-called ‘Izarads’ or ‘Izeds’; the number of different classes into which they may be divided is, however, indeterminate, being variously estimated from twenty-four up to twenty-eight, and even as high as thirty-one. There is yet a third division of spiritual powers or forces, termed by Zarathustra ‘Ferruhars’ or ‘Frawaschars’. According to our conceptions, the Ferruhars have the least influence of any upon our tendencies and dispositions in the material world, and are regarded as that spiritual element which permeates the great macrocosm, and underlies all perceptual physical activity. They are the reality behind everything of which we are conscious and appears to us as merely external and material.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave that lecture in Berlin in January 1911, sixty-four years before Mary Boyce published A History of Zoroastrianism, Volume One: The Early Period with Brill in 1975. Boyce, professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, worked from the Avesta itself rather than from Greek reports, and she argued that the fravashis were never simply the ghosts of the dead. Yasht 13, the Frawardin Yasht and the longest hymn in the Avestan collection, credits them with holding the sky in place, keeping the waters running, and bringing the unborn to birth. They are cosmic load-bearers, not ancestor spirits. The rite survives: during Frawardigan, the ten days closing the Zoroastrian year, households set out flowers and keep a fire burning to welcome the fravashis home, kept as Muktad by Parsi families in Mumbai.
Thalira's synthesis: Steiner and Boyce reached the same reading through opposite doors, he from spiritual observation in 1911, she from Avestan philology in 1975, and they meet on the claim that the Ferruhars are not memory but structure, the invisible carrying of a visible world. When you watch an animal, Zarathustra's picture asks you to see a species-wide being working through the individual creature, and behind that being, a spiritual weave holding the physical scene steady.
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