Talk:Goshurvan

Zoroastrian Cleaning

Probably need a newer source than this for such an important topic, but apparently among Zoroastrians cow's urine went from being a preventative/cure against leprosy to being a common daily ablution to avoid disease and evil spirits until the early 20th century. In lieu of cow's urine, apparently goat or human urine was used as a less effective substitute. — LlywelynII 09:04, 11 April 2022 (UTC)

Page move

@Wikibashi: Bold page moves are allowed, but for the record, can you sketch out which sources uses Gavaevodata , which sources use Goshurvan, and why you think that Goshurvan is the common name? I'm a bit skeptical as you haven't even bolded Gavaevodata as an alternate name in your new lead. Sometimes WP articles are out-of-date, of course, so if that's the case here, happy to hear it.

Also, your citation style is a bit off. You will want to put sources repeatedly cited in the Bibliography, and then you just use author last name + year + page range in the citation. You're clearly citing from more than just 138-139 from Boyle, too. In other words, you'd have something like:

Boyce says blah blah.<ref>Boyce 1975, p. 120</ref>

• Boyce, Mary (1975), A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. 1, Leiden: Brill

That said, we can worry about citation bits later. Can you go into some more detail on how exactly this rewrite was done? Can you verify you've read all the sources cited? The reason I ask is that Wikipedia has had some issues with LLM-driven rewrites lately. LLMs can be great tools for finding sources and for finding the relevant page to look at for a claim, but are not always good tools for interpreting the sources. (Of course, if that doesn't apply to you, then ignore the above.) SnowFire (talk) 21:54, 3 November 2026 (UTC)

Hi. I think you're under a misconception regarding the deity Goshurvan. Gavaevodata, is the Avestan rendition of Gav-e Ewdad. Its also briefly touched upon in the etymology section. So Goshurvan is not another name for Gavaevodata. Gavaevodata is the cow itself, and Gosh (cow) Urvan (soul), is its soul.

The three divinities Gosh urvan (soul of the cow), Gosh Tashn (creator of the cow) and Gav-e Ewdad (the primordial cow) are not exactly the same divinity, but they are very connected, and invoked in the same liturgies and prayers. Additional to how two of them are the body and soul of the same being. And for the life of me I couldn't find any more material on them individually, so it made the most sense to combine them into one article.

To summarize, Gav-e Ewdad is created by Gosh Tashan, who is either Ohrmazd or Thworashtar, a smith/creator deity, is then killed by Ahriman, and its soul, Gosh Urvan, ascends and complains about its suffering (lament of the cow), and at least as far as I understand becomes a divinity and amalgam of sacrificed animal souls.

So there's not really a common name, so much as I simply thought the soul was a better focal point among the three of them given that it is the yazata with the most information available on it, with a dedicated yasht. I don't see how centralizing the corporeal cow instead of the soul would make more sense.

As for the sources, they're collected by myself manually and placed in a note-dump, directly from the original works. I then organize, categorize and rearrange them into an article, and integrate them into prose. I do NOT use AI to cite the claims. But I do use it for formatting the sources I collect, which is why its sometimes buggy, though as far as I know this is allowed by wikipedia. Wikibashi (talk) 22:24, 3 November 2026 (UTC)

@Wikibashi: Don't sweat the citation formatting. Happy to help with that.

However, I do sweat the refactoring you've done here. Wikipedia has a process called Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. You basically deleted the article on Gavaevodata by moving it and refactoring it to a new article about something else. I've looked into it, and I'm not sold that these are the same topic. If you want to create a separate article on Goshurvan, that's fine, but you should not have just surprise deleted the Gavaevodata article without a discussion first (e.g. something as simple as a talk page comment saying "I think we should refactor this" would have been fine). This is going to be a bit of a mess to untangle, now.

Here's my proposal for going forward: We move this article's history back to Gavaevodata. You can replay the current article as a fresh, new article requiring review by the new page patrol via an edit of Goshurvan. Does this sound acceptable, or do you think that these really are one and the same topic? SnowFire (talk) 04:26, 4 November 2026 (UTC)

• Side note: I think a lot of the Goshurvan section seems to be on sacrifice in general rather than Goshurvan. I wonder if there might yet be a third article here, something like Sacrificial traditions in Zoroastrianism. SnowFire (talk) 04:26, 4 November 2026 (UTC)

  I don't understand why you're not convinced regarding their connection? Why do you think they are different topics? Wikibashi (talk) 05:24, 4 November 2026 (UTC)

  Regarding Goshurvan and sacrifice, its sort of the whole point. When an animal is sacrificed, its soul, or its "Urvan", goes back and reconnects with Goshurvan, the soul of the cow. Hence why animal sacrifice, and how for example improper sacrifice leads a soul to not go back to Goshurvan becomes a relevant topic.

  The connections with Gavaevodata (Gav-e Ewdad/Gav-e Ewagdad) are also immense, and in my view crucial. Gavaevodata is the primordial cow, whom during Ahriman's attack on creation, is killed. The account of its death is recounted in the "Cow's lament", but here's the thing, when Gavaevodata dies and laments about it to the Gods, she's/he's doing so as Goshurvan. Within the same mythical account, the cow and its soul are the same character.

  The outlier here is Goshtashan. The creator of the cow, because he's objectively a different god, but he's almost always invoked alongside Goshurvan, and his entire existence is relative to Gavaevodata. So even if Goshtashan is Ohrmazd, he's Ohrmazd in relation to Gavaevodata, not in spite of him.

  I think most importantly the equivocation of Gavaevodata and Goshurvan during the cow's lament is the best argument for why they constitute the same topic. And given that out of the two, Goshurvan has the divine functions, and is the yazata, it's more appropriate to have him/her be the center of the article.

  So even thought the primordial cow and his soul are technically separate, the overlap and continuity between them is strong enough to justify being treated under the same topic. Were we to separate them, both their articles would end up with a great deal of reused material because the mythic account of both is almost entirely condensed inside the myth of the cow's lament, which is almost dedicated to explaining how Gavaevodata became Goshurvan. Wikibashi (talk) 06:11, 4 November 2026 (UTC)

  I have one last argument in favor of keeping them: Faravahars

  Fravashis or faravahars are the guardian angels or otherwise souls/urvan of the righteous. It is said that every being has a fravahr. Sometimes due to overlap from their cults fravahr and urvan are entirely fused together. By looking at accounts such as the birth of Zoroaster, or the appearance of the fravashi/urvan of various righteous dead, we can clearly see how Zoroastrianism treats a fravashi as an integral aspect of a being.

  "The Fravahr is considered one of the essential spiritual components of a person, described as the “everlasting and heavenly tutelary of material beings,” alongside other faculties such as axw (“vital strength”), baodah (“perception”), and urvan (“soul”)." -this is from the Faravahar article linked above.

  Now connecting that back to Gavaevodata, Gosh URVAN is not only the urvan of the cow, and an "essential spiritual component of a person", but Gosh urvan is also called the Gosh Fravashi - which I believed was a point I included while writing the article but I think it may have been lost among my notes - further highlighting the connection between the two.

  So in a previous message when I said they were separate beings, I was explaining it wrong/poorly. They are different in the sense that they are two stages in the life of the same abstract entity of "The Cow", not that Gavaevodata is one god and Goshurvan is another Wikibashi (talk) 06:21, 4 November 2026 (UTC)