Avesta Avesta The Avesta is the primary collection of religious texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the otherwise unrecorded Avestan language. The Avesta texts fall into several different categories, arranged either by dialect, or by usage. The principal text in the liturgical group is the "Yasna", which takes its name from the Yasna ceremony, Zoroastrianism's primary act of worship, and at which the "Yasna" text is recited. The most important portion of the "Yasna" texts are the five Gathas, consisting of seventeen hymns attributed to Zoroaster himself. These hymns, together with five other short Old Avestan texts that are also part of
Religion with solemnity and gravity. The sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his seminal book "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life", defined religion as a "unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things". By sacred things he meant things "set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them". Sacred things are not, however, limited to gods or spirits. On the contrary, a sacred thing can be "a rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word, anything can be sacred".