Ahura Mazda

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A great god is Ahuramazda, the rock face declares, who created this earth, who created yonder sky, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Darius king. The words are cut in three languages into the cliff at Naqsh-e Rostam, above the rock-hewn tomb of the king who ruled from the Indus to the Aegean. They open almost every monument Darius the Great left behind, a formula repeated at Persepolis, at Susa, on the great relief at Bisotun. Before the king names himself, before he counts his provinces, he names the maker of the world. The creation comes first; the kingship is a consequence of it.

The god so invoked is Ahura Mazda — the Wise Lord, the uncreated source of all that is good, the supreme deity whom the prophet Zarathustra proclaimed against the older gods of the Iranian pasture-lands. From within the tradition he founds, there is no symmetry to the cosmos and no second power equal to him. There is one Lord, wholly good, who made light and life and the right order of things; and there is the lie that opposes him, real and destructive but not his equal, and in the end not his survivor.

The name and its first witnesses

The name is a phrase. Ahura is the Avestan word for “lord,” cognate with the Vedic asura; mazdā is “wisdom” — a noun built on the Indo-Iranian root meaning to place the mind, to attend, to hold in thought. Together they read as “Lord Wisdom” or “the Wise Lord,” and in the oldest layer of the tradition the two elements float free of each other, so that the prophet can address Mazdā Ahura or Ahura Mazdā or simply Mazdā as the rhythm of his verse requires. The fusion into a single divine name belongs to a later stage. The Old Persian of the royal inscriptions writes it as one word, Auramazdā; the Parthians said Ahurmazd; in the Middle Persian of the Sasanian church the name contracts to Ohrmazd, the form under which the god presides over the whole Pahlavi literature.

The earliest dated writing of the name comes not from the prophet’s community but from a king. Darius I carved it on the cliff at Bisotun around 520 BCE, in the long trilingual account of how he seized and held the throne. The god is named there as the one who granted him the kingdom and steadied his hand. But the theology the name carries is older than any inscription — far older. It rises first in the Gathas, the seventeen hymns in Old Avestan that the tradition holds to be the words of Zarathustra himself, and that modern philology, judging by their archaic grammar and their closeness to the language of the Rigveda, places deep in the second millennium BCE — most estimates cluster around 1200 to 1000 BCE, with Mary Boyce arguing for a horizon earlier still. These hymns survive only in manuscripts that begin in the late thirteenth century CE; the oldest, copied in Gujarat in 1323, descends from an exemplar two and a half millennia younger than the poetry it carries. Between the prophet’s voice and the first surviving page lies an unbroken chain of priestly memory, sung in a sacred tongue that had long since ceased to be anyone’s mother language.

In the Gathas the Wise Lord is approached as a person in dialogue. Zarathustra questions him, argues with him, asks who fixed the course of the sun and the moon, who upholds the earth below and the sky from falling, who set the waters and the plants — and answers his own questions with the Lord’s name. The god is the father of Asha, the truth, the right order that runs through the world; he is “the same forever,” the one who through his good mind allotted to each their reward. This is not a god among gods. The hymns turn polemical against the daevas, the older deities of the Iranian pantheon, and against the priests who sacrifice to them — and the worship of Mazda alone, Mazdayasna, becomes the name of the new religion.

The winged-disc emblem (faravahar) carved at Persepolis. Whether the figure depicts Ahura Mazda, a guardian-spirit, or the royal glory is debated. — Napishtim, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The bounteous spirit and the war within creation

What distinguishes Ahura Mazda from a simple high god is the shape of the drama he stands at the head of. The Gathas describe two primal spirits who, at the beginning, made a choice. Yasna 30 names them the twins, the Bounteous and the Hostile, who in thought and word and deed chose the better and the worse — and “between these two the wise chose rightly, the foolish not so.” One spirit chose to make life; the other chose, in the chilling phrase, “not-life.” The whole moral architecture of the religion descends from this primordial decision.

The Bounteous Spirit is Spenta Mainyu — and here the tradition holds a subtlety that has occupied interpreters for over a century. In the Gathic frame, Spenta Mainyu is not a separate deity set beside Ahura Mazda but the Wise Lord’s own creative activity, the spirit through which he acts, makes, and sustains. It is by his Bounteous Spirit that Mazda fashions the world. Set against it is Angra Mainyu, the Hostile Spirit, later contracted to Ahriman — the one who chose not-life, the maker of the lie, the assailant of everything good. The opposition that runs through Zoroastrian thought is thus, at its origin, the opposition between the creative will of God and a rejecting will that defines itself against him. The dualism is real and total; but it is a bounded war. The two are not two eternal equals locked in endless stalemate. The Hostile Spirit is doomed; the conflict has an end, and the end is the unmaking of evil and the restoration of the good world to a perfection that can no longer be spoiled.

Between Ahura Mazda and the created world stand the Amesha Spentas, the “Bounteous Immortals” — six great divine entities, or seven when the Wise Lord himself is counted at their head, each one at once an aspect of God, a moral principle, and the guardian of a portion of creation. They are named together in the Gathas and elaborated in the later liturgy:

• Vohu Manah, the Good Mind, who guards the cattle and the beneficent animals;
• Asha Vahishta, Best Truth or Righteousness, who presides over fire and the cosmic order;
• Khshathra Vairya, Desirable Dominion, who holds the sky and the metals;
• Spenta Armaiti, Holy Devotion, feminine, who is the earth itself;
• Haurvatat, Wholeness or Health, who keeps the waters;
• Ameretat, Immortality, who keeps the plants.

The structure is a theology, a cosmology, and an ethics at one stroke. Each Immortal personifies a virtue, presides over an element of the seven creations — sky, water, earth, plants, animals, humanity, and fire — and offers the worshipper a way into the divine: to think with a good mind, to act in truth, to honor the earth, is to draw near to the Bounteous Immortal who is that quality and to strengthen the side of the Wise Lord in the world. Every one of them has an antithesis among the demons; the Good Mind is shadowed by the Evil Mind, Truth by the Lie, Dominion by Misrule. To choose well is to enlist.

This is the summons at the heart of the religion: the human being, standing in the middle of a contested cosmos, is called to choose a side, and the choice matters cosmically. Good thoughts, good words, good deeds — humata, hukhta, huvarshta — are not private virtues but contributions to a war whose outcome they help decide. The fire that burns in the temple is not a god but the visible token of Asha, of truth and the presence of the Wise Lord; before it the worshipper makes, daily, the same choice the twin spirits made at the beginning.

Naqsh-e Rostam: the rock-cut Achaemenid royal tombs and, at left, the Ka’ba-ye Zartosht. Darius I’s tomb inscription opens by naming Ahuramazda as creator. — Diego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The king’s god and the church’s god

When Ahura Mazda steps out of the Avestan hymns and into the daylight of the historical record, it is on stone. The Achaemenid kings — Darius, Xerxes, and their successors — open their inscriptions by ascribing the world and their own rule to Auramazdā. The relief carved above Darius at Bisotun shows the king facing a row of bound rebels, and floating over the scene a winged disc bearing a human figure who extends a hand toward him. The same winged figure appears at Persepolis. For centuries it has been read, almost reflexively, as a portrait of Ahura Mazda — the supreme god hovering above the king he has chosen.

Whether the emblem depicts the god at all is, in fact, contested, and the contest is instructive about how little the symbol explains itself. The reading of it as Ahura Mazda was urged in the 1920s by the Parsi scholar Jamshedji Maneckji Unvala; it was challenged almost at once. Some have taken the winged figure for a fravashi, a guardian-spirit, though the fravashis of the texts are feminine and the relief figure is bearded and male. The reading that now prevails in scholarship — argued by Irach Taraporewala and later supported by Alireza Shapur Shahbazi and Mary Boyce — sees in it not the god but the khvarenah, the royal glory or fortune, the divine empowerment that descends on a rightful king. No consensus has hardened. The Achaemenids left no theology to tell us, and the most famous image associated with the Wise Lord may not be his portrait at all.

Whether the Persian kings were Zoroastrians in any strict sense is its own long question; the inscriptions invoke Auramazda without ever naming Zarathustra, the Gathas, or the Amesha Spentas, and the religion of the court need not have matched the religion of the eastern priests who carried the Avesta. But the god’s name and his supremacy are unmistakable, and by the time of the Sasanian empire the connection is explicit and institutional. Under the Sasanians, from the third century CE, Ohrmazd is the god of a structured church, served by a priesthood of the Magi and codified in a vast Middle Persian literature. The Bundahishn, the “Primal Creation,” lays out his cosmology in full: Ohrmazd dwelling on high in the endless light, Ahriman in the abyss of darkness, the two separated by the void; Ohrmazd’s foreknowledge of the assault to come; the fashioning of the world first in spirit and then in body as the arena in which evil can be drawn in, trapped, and at last destroyed. The whole of time is divided into twelve thousand years, three thousand of pure creation, three of material creation, three of the “mixture” when good and evil are intertwined, and a final three of separation, ending in the renovation of the world.

That eschatology gives the Wise Lord his final word. At the close of the great year a series of saviors will be born — the Saoshyant, raised from the miraculously preserved seed of Zarathustra — and the last of them will raise the dead and lead the world through a river of molten metal, painless to the righteous, that purges the last evil away. Ahriman is undone; hell is emptied; the renovated creation stands restored and incorruptible. The Wise Lord does not merely outlast the Hostile Spirit. He abolishes him, and the cosmos he made is healed of the very possibility of harm.

A Zoroastrian fire temple at Yazd, heartland of the surviving Iranian community. The fire is not worshipped as a god but venerated as the emblem of Asha, the truth of Ahura Mazda. — Zenith210, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Contested afterlives: Time, the twin, and the question of inheritance

Two shadows fall across the figure of the Wise Lord, and both belong properly to the history of how he was received rather than to the core of what is taught about him.

The first is Zurvanism. A myth, attested almost entirely in hostile outside sources — the fifth-century Armenian polemicist Eznik of Kolb, Syriac and Manichaean writers, later Arabic reports — and absent from the surviving Avesta, makes Ohrmazd and Ahriman not the first principles at all but the twin sons of Zurvan, Time. In the story Zurvan sacrifices for a thousand years to obtain a son; in a moment of doubt a second son is conceived; Ohrmazd is born of the sacrifice and Ahriman of the doubt, and because Zurvan had promised dominion to the firstborn, the deceitful Ahriman tears his way out first and is granted nine thousand years of provisional rule before Ohrmazd reigns. This subordinates the Wise Lord to a prior power and dissolves the absolute goodness of the origin into the accident of a father’s hesitation. R. C. Zaehner, in his 1955 study, argued that Zurvanism had been a dominant, perhaps the official, Sasanian theology, purged from the record by a later orthodox reaction. That reconstruction has since been substantially revised; Albert de Jong and others have shown how circular Zaehner’s method was, defining Zurvanism by certain themes and then finding it wherever those themes appeared. What can be said with confidence is that the myth existed and that it ran against the grain of the mainstream theology, in which Ahura Mazda is uncreated and answers to no one. How widely it was held — a court school, a marginal speculation, or something larger — stays genuinely uncertain, and the bias of the sources that preserve it makes the uncertainty hard to lift.

The second is the long argument over inheritance. A cluster of features central to the later Abrahamic faiths — a personified evil power set against the good creator, ranked holy beings between God and the world, bodily resurrection, a final judgment, a savior at the end of history — has precise earlier parallels in the Zoroastrian materials, and the two centuries in which Judah lay under Persian rule supply a plausible occasion for the contact. Whether the Iranian forms shaped the Jewish and Christian ones, or the borrowing ran the other way, or both drew on a common ancient matrix, turns on weighing an oral tradition against its much later written attestation. That argument belongs with the figure in whom it grows sharpest — the world-savior and the renovation at the end of time — and is taken up in the entry on the Saoshyant.

Through all of this the Wise Lord has never become a figure of the past. He is worshipped still — in the fire temples of the Parsis of India, whose ancestors carried the faith by sea from Iran after the Arab conquest, and in the surviving Iranian communities of Yazd and Kerman and the global diaspora. The consecrated fire of the great temple at Yazd is held to have burned since the Sasanian centuries. Before it the behdin, the one of the good religion, still recites the old confession and makes the old choice, on the side of truth against the lie, in a war whose end the Wise Lord has already, from the beginning, decided.

→ Related: Zoroaster · Avesta · Angra Mainyu · Saoshyant · Zurvan · The Magi · Naqsh E Rostam · Persepolis · The Parsis · Ostanes · Harran · Sabians Of Harran · Chaldeans · Sasanian Iranian Wisdom Tradition · Mithraic Mysteries