Verethragna

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Victory did not announce itself to the prophet in a single shape. In his own hymn it came ten times over, each time more overwhelming than the last. First a wind, running and impetuous, the fairest of the Wise Lord’s creations. Then a bull with horns of gold. Then a white horse, its ears and muzzle worked in gold. Then a burden-bearing camel in the heat of rut. Then a boar, sharp of tusk and quick to kill. Then a beautiful youth of fifteen, at the very edge of a man’s strength. Then a swift bird of prey. Then a wild ram, then a fighting buck — and last of all a warrior in his arms, bearing a golden blade. The list is an ascending catalog of the world’s most penetrating strengths, and the god who wears them all is Verethragna, the yazata of victory: the force by which the good creation breaks through whatever stands in its way.

To read the ten forms in order is to watch a single idea take on flesh again and again. Not war for its own sake, but the overcoming of resistance in every register the world offers — the gale that flattens, the horned charge, the tusk, the raptor’s stoop, the sworded man. Each form is the same power seen through a different animal, and the sum of them is what the Avestan name says plainly: the smiting of all that obstructs.

The name and how it reaches the record

The oldest thing about the god is his name, and the name is a sentence. Avestan Vərəθraγna is a compound of vərəθra — “resistance,” “the obstruction,” the barrier an enemy throws up in defense — and the verbal root gan-, “to smite.” Put together they mean the smiting of resistance: victory itself, made into a person. He is a yazata, a “being worthy of worship,” one of the beneficent divinities created by and serving Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord. He is not victory over one named enemy but the abstract fact of breaking-through, standing in the divine world as the very possibility of triumph.

From that Avestan name the later Iranian languages drew a chain of forms. Middle Persian shortened and smoothed it to Warahrān and Wahrām; New Persian carried it forward as Bahrām, also written Vahram and Behram — a name that kings took, that ordinary men still bear, and that survives today wherever an Iranian is called Bahram. The god’s own title became one of the commonest personal names in the Persian world, which is a measure of how much people wanted what he stood for.

Behind the Iranian name lies something older still. Verethragna answers, syllable for syllable, to a Vedic word from the far side of the Indo-Iranian split: Vṛtrahan, “slayer of Vṛtra,” an epithet applied above all to Indra, the warrior-god of the Rigveda who shatters the dragon Vṛtra and releases the pent-up waters. The two names descend from one Proto-Indo-Iranian ancestor. But whether the Iranian figure is at bottom the same dragon-slaying hero is a question scholars have argued without resolving. In their classic study Vṛtra et Vṛθragna (Paris, 1934), Émile Benveniste and Louis Renou pressed the case that the Iranian god had drifted decisively away from his Vedic cousin: where Indra kills a specific monster, Verethragna personifies the abstract act of smashing-obstacles, victory as such, with no dragon required. The distinction has been influential and is treated as the standard comparative frame in the Encyclopaedia Iranica’s article on Bahrām, though the comparison remains a debated one, and not every philologist would draw the line so sharply. What is not in doubt is that the Iranian record hands the god to us not as a myth of one killing but as a portrait of power in general.

That portrait is drawn almost entirely from one text. Among the yashts — the hymns of the Younger Avesta, each addressed to a single divinity — the fourteenth is his: the Bahrām Yašt, Yasht 14, given over wholly to the praise of Verethragna. He is, by the reckoning of his own hymn, the most fully armed and the most triumphant of the yazatas, and the hymn spends its opening stanzas on the theophany of the ten forms before turning to the strength he lends those who invoke him. The Avesta as a whole reached its surviving shape across many centuries and was written down late; the yashts are read critically, as layered compositions rather than single-sitting scripture. But the figure who steps out of Yasht 14 is unmistakable, and he is the same figure whose name the whole later tradition kept. The corpus that preserves him is the Avesta, the scripture whose oldest stratum the tradition traces to the prophet Zarathushtra himself — a prophet whose own dates remain among the most disputed questions in the field, set by a traditional reckoning near the sixth century BCE and by modern linguistic argument far earlier, somewhere in the range of 1500 to 1000 BCE.

The office of victory

Within the Zoroastrian cosmos everything turns on a contest. The good creation of the Wise Lord, ordered by the cosmic truth called Asha, is opposed at every point by the Lie, the Druj, which works to obstruct, corrupt, and undo. Time itself has a direction in this vision: it moves toward the Frashokereti, the final renovation in which the Lie is broken utterly and the good creation is made whole and wonderful. In that long war of order against obstruction, Verethragna is the irresistible force by which Asha pushes through. He is not the strategist and not the judge. He is the breakthrough — the moment the barrier gives way.

His victory is meant in its fullest sense, and this is what keeps him from being a mere god of battles. The resistance he smites is everything that blocks the flourishing of the good: not only the armed enemy but sickness, sterility, hostility, the demons of obstruction that clot the world. So his gifts run past the battlefield into the body and the household. The hymn credits him with the power to heal and to confer virility, to keep flesh and limb intact, to make the barren fruitful — the whole territory of physical wholeness and strength. He is also, in the living and historical tradition, a protector of those who travel, the divinity a person calls on before setting out into danger. Victory, in his keeping, is less a battlefield outcome than a condition of the body and the road: to be unobstructed, unbroken, and able to pass.

Silver drachm of Bahram II (r. 274–293), a Sasanian king who bore the god’s name; the obverse shows the king with his queen and a smaller figure offering a ring of power, the reverse a fire altar. dynamosquito, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The theophany of Yasht 14 is his signature, and it repays a second look. The ten forms are not a random menagerie. They move from the elemental (the wind) through the great domestic beasts prized by a herding, riding people (the gold-horned bull, the gold-eared white horse, the rutting camel) to the wild and dangerous (the boar), pause on the human (the youth of fifteen, poised at the threshold of full strength), leap to the air (the bird of prey), and close among the horned fighters of the flock and the hills (the ram, the buck) before arriving at the fully armed man with his golden weapon. Each is a form in which overwhelming, penetrating force is most concentrated in its kind. To have appeared as all ten is to have exhausted the world’s vocabulary of strength.

The seventh form carries a motif the hymn dwells on. The bird of prey is the Varəgna — rendered variously as a raven or a falcon, a swift raptor in any case — and the hymn holds that the feather of the Varəgna, borne on the body, makes its bearer invincible: no one can strike him down, and the feather can even turn back and scatter a hostile army. This is a detail internal to the text, a motif of the hymn’s praise rather than an instruction anyone is given to follow — the Yasht reports the talisman’s power as part of the god’s glory, not as a rite to be worked. Read that way it belongs with the ten forms themselves: another image of a strength that cannot be resisted, projected this time onto a single feather.

His place in the calendar fixes him in the rhythm of devotion. The Zoroastrian month has thirty days, and each day bears the name of a divinity; the twentieth day is Bahrām’s own, the Bahrām rōz, when the yazata of victory is especially remembered. To keep his day is to keep, once a month, the memory that the good creation is meant to prevail. Among the divine company he stands close to the martial and the just — near Sraosha, the heard word who keeps the night-watch against the demons, and near Mithra, the lord of covenant and the light of the contract — but his own function is singular. He is the one whose whole being is the overcoming itself, the free warrior’s power placed at the service of the good.

The fire that bears his name

Verethragna’s afterlife is larger than his hymn. His name marks the highest and most sacred grade of consecrated Zoroastrian fire: the Ātaš Bahrām, the “Fire of Victory.” That naming is exact theology. The fire of the highest grade is the fire of triumph over the Lie, and it carries the god’s name because it carries his office — the breaking-through of the good, made visible as an ever-burning flame. The fire is not the yazata, and the yazata is not the fire; the divine fire Atar is a son of the Wise Lord and the sign of the truth, while Verethragna is the power of victory whose name the highest grade was given. But the two meet in the temple: the flame of victory bears the victor’s name.

The enthroning of such a fire — the long gathering and purification of its many sources — is the most elaborate of all the tradition’s rites, and it belongs to the story of the divine fire itself; the handful of Ātaš Bahrāms still alight, at Yazd in Iran and at Udvada and elsewhere in India, each keep their own histories. What matters here is the name they share: every fire of the highest grade, wherever it burns, is a fire of victory, and every unbroken watch kept over one is a small standing instance of the office Verethragna personifies — the good, holding.

The reclining Heracles carved at Bisotun (Behistun), Iran, dated to 148 BCE; in the Hellenized Iranian world the Greek strongman served as an image for the god of victory. Ninara, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The god was at his most public under the Sasanians, the last great Iranian empire before Islam, which ruled from 224 to 651 and made the worship of the Wise Lord the religion of its state. There his name was royal. Five kings reigned as Bahram — Bahram I through Bahram V — and later the general Bahram Chobin, remembered as Bahram VI, seized the throne for a brief and contested reign. A king who took the god’s name took, by that act, a claim on victory itself; the coins that survive from these reigns show the crowned face beside the fire altar, the two emblems of Sasanian legitimacy on one small disk of silver. That a dynasty reached so often for this particular name says how near the yazata of victory stood to the idea of kingship.

His name traveled further than his cult. In the later astrology of the Persian world the planet Mars came to be called Bahrām, the red wanderer matched to the god of war — an identification worth marking precisely so that it is not mistaken for the thing itself. The planet-Bahrām of the astrologers is a separate matter from the Avestan yazata of Yasht 14, a late astral naming and not the divinity the hymn praises. Abroad, in the frontiers where Iranian religion met other tongues, the figure of victory was received into other frames. On the coinage of the Kushan king Kanishka, in Bactrian script, appears a deity named Orlagno (ορλαγνο) — a direct cognate reflex of Verethragna, the Iranian victor recognizable on a coin struck at the edge of India. And among the Armenians the same god became Vahagn, whose name derives from the Parthian form of Verethragna and who was called Vishapak’agh, “dragon-reaper,” a slayer of the vishaps of Armenian myth. Under Hellenistic influence Vahagn was identified with the Greek Heracles, so thoroughly that the fifth-century Armenian translation of the Bible uses his name to render Heracles at 2 Maccabees 4:19. The reclining strongman carved into the rock at Bisotun, club at his feet and lion-skin beneath him, belongs to that same world of exchange, where the Greek hero could stand in for the Iranian power of victory.

These Greek and Armenian faces are reception, not the yazata himself — the god of the Avesta refracted through other peoples’ images of overwhelming strength. What holds across every version, from the Bactrian coin to the Armenian dragon-reaper to the Greek strongman on the Median rock, is the one thing the name always meant: the force that will not be resisted. The prophet’s hymn had already said as much, and said it ten times. When the priests of Udvada and Yazd lay sandalwood on their gathered flames, keeping alight the fire that carries his name, they keep faith with the same conviction the ten forms were built to carry — that in the long contest of the truth against the Lie, the breaking-through belongs, in the end, to the good.

→ Related: Atar · Sraosha · Fravashi · Haoma · Yazd Atash Behram · Udvada Atash Behram · Ka Ba Ye Zartosht · Pir E Naraki · The Zoroastrians · The Sasanians · Gathas