Ahura Mazdā

Etymology

In Old Persian the name is written Auramazdā (𐎠𐎢𐎼𐎶𐏀𐎭𐎠), name and title fused into one word. It joins two Iranian words: ahura, "lord", and mazdā, "wisdom", hence "the Wise Lord", or, keeping the grammar, "Lord Wisdom". Even the form is debated: some read Mazdā, some Mazdāh; some take it as a noun, "Wisdom", others as an adjective, "wise", qualifying ahura, the question to which F. B. J. Kuiper devoted a study, "Ahura Mazdā 'Lord Wisdom'?"^[1] Ahura is cognate with the Vedic asura, a class of sovereign lords; the Wise Lord's Indian counterpart has been sought in the "nameless, exalted Asura" of the Rigveda, that is, in Varuna, guardian of ṛta, the exact cognate of Iranian arta/aša, though the identification is not universally accepted. Mary Boyce suggested the earthly model for such a "Lord Wisdom" was the high priest, who led by counsel and knowledge of the law.^[2]

The deeper background is the shared religion of the Indo-Iranians before they split, in which the asura/ahura lords stood beside the daiva/daēva gods. The two branches then diverged in opposite directions, so that in India the devas remained gods while asura drifted toward "demon", and in Iran the ahuras were exalted and the daivas demonised, a reversal that surfaces sharply in Xerxes' inscription against the daiva-worshippers (below). The name itself may be very old: the earliest possible trace in western Iran is an Assyrian god-list of the eighth or seventh century BCE that names as-sa-ra ma-za-áš, held to preserve the name of the greatest of the Ahuras, presumably the Old Iranian divinity rather than the prophet's God.^[3]

Names and scripts

Because the empire wrote in many scripts, the Wise Lord is attested under many spellings: Old Persian Auramazdā (𐎠𐎢𐎼𐎶𐏀𐎭𐎠) in the monumental cuneiform; Elamite U-ra-maš-da in the administrative tablets from Persepolis; Imperial Aramaic ʾhwrmzd (⁨𐡀𐡄𐡅𐡓𐡌𐡆𐡃⁩) in the chancery, including the Aramaic version of the Behistun text; and, through the Greeks, Ōromasdēs or Horomazes. That spread is itself evidence, for the god of the dynasty's proclamations was also a name handled in the day-to-day paperwork of the state. Later the same divinity appears as Armenian Aramazd, and in Middle Persian as Ohrmazd, the form of the living Zoroastrian faith.

Creator of the world

The standard Achaemenid royal text opens by invoking Ahura Mazdā as creator, in a formula repeated with little variation across the reigns. On Darius's tomb it runs:

"A great god is the Wise Lord, who created this earth, who created the sky, who created mankind, and created happiness for mankind." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNa)^[4]

The last words are doctrinally pointed. The god creates not only the world but happiness (Old Persian šiyāti, "well-being, blessedness"), and, as Boyce observed, in Zoroaster's teaching the supreme Lord creates only what is good.^[3] The palace charter from Susa opens on the same note, praising "a great god" who "created this excellent thing which is seen, who created happiness for man, who set wisdom and energy down upon Darius the king" (DSf); and it says of the king's making that Ahura Mazdā "created me; he made me king; he bestowed upon me this kingdom" (DSf §3), while the tomb text adds that the god "bestowed wisdom and activity upon Darius the King" (DNb §7).^[5] Creation and kingship are one act of the divine will, for the formula continues, "who made Darius king, one king of many, one lord of many", and against the world's disorder the god raises the king as remedy:

"When Ahuramazda saw this earth in commotion, thereafter he bestowed it upon me; he made me king. I am king." (Darius I, DNa)^[4]

The creation-formula is at once terse and expandable, a liturgical opening the later kings inherited word for word. Xerxes' inscriptions begin identically; the Wise Lord "who created this earth, who created that sky, who created man, who created happiness for man" stands at the head of the corpus from Darius to Artaxerxes.

The king prays in turn that the creator keep the good creation from the powers that unmake it:

"May the Wise Lord protect this land from the hostile army, from famine, and from the Lie." (Darius I, Persepolis, DPd)^[6]

The prayer is fuller in the original, and its balance of gift and petition is characteristic: "May Ahuramazda bear me aid, with the gods of the royal house; and may Ahuramazda protect this country from a (hostile) army, from famine, from the Lie! Upon this country may there not come an army, nor famine, nor the Lie; this I pray as a boon from Ahuramazda together with the gods of the royal house."^[6] Enemy, dearth, and falsehood are the three faces of disorder, held off by the creator through his king. The blessing the king asks is not conquest but continuance, as the Persepolis foundation text (DPe) makes explicit:

"If the Persian people shall be protected, thereafter for the longest while happiness unbroken will by Ahura come down upon this royal house." (Darius I, Persepolis, DPe)^[7]

Giver of kingship

Ahura Mazdā is above all the god who "made Darius king", and Achaemenid kingship is a trust held "by the favour of Ahuramazda" (vašnā Auramazdāha). The claim is made most fully at Behistun, where Darius reckons his seizure of the throne as the god's own doing:

"By the grace of Ahuramazda am I king; Ahuramazda has granted me the kingdom." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §5)^[8]

The Behistun narrative repeats the phrase "Ahuramazda bore me aid" like a refrain after every battle, so that the suppression of the nine rebel kings reads as a single campaign fought on the god's behalf. "Ahuramazda bestowed the kingdom upon me; Ahuramazda bore me aid until I got possession of this kingdom; by the favor of Ahuramazda I hold this kingdom" (DB §9).^[7] To rebel against the king is therefore to side with the Lie against the god's own order, and Darius can even reckon a rebel province's defeat as the correction of impiety: "Those Elamites were faithless and by them Ahuramazda was not worshipped. I worshipped Ahuramazda; by the favor of Ahuramazda, as was my desire, thus I did unto them" (DB §72).^[7]

The winged figure

No image of Ahura Mazdā is recorded from the early Achaemenid period. The famous figure in the winged ring that hovers above the king at Behistun, on the reliefs of Persepolis, and on the tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam, long taken by European scholars for the god himself, has an identity that is in fact unresolved and actively contested. The old reading as Ahura Mazdā is still defended (Root, von Gall)^[9]; many now prefer the royal khvarnah (Middle Persian farr), the divine glory that alights on the legitimate king (Boyce, Shahbazi). Boyce argues that the figure cannot be the supreme God, since it is male where the fravashi was female and since it mirrors the king too closely, wearing his crown and his robe and holding the ring of sovereignty^[3]; Gnoli judges even the khvarnah reading leading but unproven, the glory being nowhere named in the inscriptions.^[10] A fravashi or dynastic-emblem reading has its adherents too. The form itself is borrowed: the winged disk descends ultimately from the Egyptian falcon-sun of Horus, was adopted across the Near East as a sign of power and royalty, and reached the Iranians through an Assyrian and Urartian development in which a crowned, bearded man stands within the disk, holding a bow. In every known Iranian example the bow is replaced by the ring of divinity.^[3] On Darius's tomb the figure seems to carry a double sense, the glory (or the god) and the sun, with the Akkadian crescent-moon disc of Sin set behind it, so that the king is shown at prayer before the fire and beneath the sun and moon, a scene Boyce reads as the king praying "according to orthodox Zoroastrian prescriptions".^[3] The one safe statement is that it marks the king's rule as divinely sanctioned (see the winged symbol).

The god's own presence was marked not by an idol but by an emptiness. From Cyrus to Darius III an empty chariot drawn by white horses accompanied the Persian army, sacred to the god the Greeks called Zeus, that is Ahura Mazdā, who was invoked to ride in it unseen.^[11]

Arta and the Lie

The creation is good, and ordered by arta (Avestan aša), the truth or right arrangement of all things, and it is besieged by the drauga, the Lie. The king is the god's agent in that contest, and on his tomb Darius turns the theology into the fullest code of conduct to survive from any Achaemenid (DNb §8):

"I am a friend to the right; I am no friend to the wrong... It is not my wish that the mighty should do wrong to the weak, nor that the weak should do wrong to the mighty." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb)^[5]

The passage is worth following further, because it is the nearest thing to a self-portrait a Persian king has left. He binds the ideal of right to impartial judgement, to reward strictly by desert, and to a hard self-mastery:

"What a man says against a man, that does not convince me, until I hear the testimony of both. The man who cooperates, him according to his cooperative action, him thus do I reward. Who does harm, him according to the damage thus I punish. I am not hot-tempered; what things develop in my anger, I hold firmly under control by my thinking power. I am firmly ruling over my own (impulses)." (Darius I, Naqsh-e Rostam, DNb, trans. Kent)^[5]

The single enemy he names is the Lie: "I am not a friend to the man who is a Lie-follower." The same runs through Behistun, where Darius states the ground of the god's favour negatively, as innocence of the three royal vices of hostility, falsehood and tyranny:

"Ahuramazda brought me help, because I was not wicked, nor was I a liar, nor was I a despot; I have ruled according to righteousness." (Darius I, Behistun, DB §63)^[8]

Kent's rendering of the same section adds the divine plural that so exercises the debate over the royal religion: "For this reason Ahuramazda bore aid, and the other gods who are, because I was not hostile, I was not a Lie-follower, I was not a doer of wrong."^[7] To his successors Darius leaves the contest itself as an inheritance: "Thou who shalt be king hereafter, protect thyself vigorously from the Lie; the man who shall be a Lie-follower, him do thou punish well" (DB §55).^[7] The stress on discernment, justice, self-control and resolution is, as Boyce noted, wholly consonant with Zoroastrian moral theology; in bridling his wrath and dealing even-handed justice the king serves Aša Vahišta, who hypostatizes right, and Khšathra Vairya, honoured through rightly exercised power, "as a true Zoroastrian should".^[3]

The other gods

The royal cult was supreme but not, on its face, exclusive. Darius invokes Ahura Mazdā "together with the gods of the royal house" (DPd), which Boyce renders "with all the gods", and, in the passage most pressed by both sides, names "Ahuramazda and the other gods who are" (DB). He never honours one of these lesser beings by name, Boyce notes, though Zoroaster himself names more than a dozen yazatas in the Gāthās.^[3] The word Darius uses for the other divine beings is baga, rare in the Avesta, not the characteristic Zoroastrian yazata; his texts also lack spənta, the name Angra Mainyu, and the name of Zoroaster himself. The maximalist reply (Boyce) is that Zoroaster preached an original, not a present, monotheism, so that the lesser divine beings are the god's own emanations and to invoke them with him is orthodox, and that Avestan religious vocabulary took centuries to displace the older Persian terms; the Sasanian high priest Kirdēr could still call heaven "the place of the bagas". Even so, the attempt to read "the other gods who are" as the six Aməša Spəntas is, as Gershevitch showed, not very convincing.^[12] The administrative tablets confirm the plural reality on the ground: one Persepolis Fortification tablet (PF 337) records Ahura Mazdā together with "Mithra-and-the-Baga", and the crown issued rations for many gods at once.^[13] The Achaemenid state is best described not as monotheist but as a working henotheism, Ahura Mazdā supreme without any denial that other gods are and may be served. Cyrus and Darius alike honoured the gods of Babylon, Jerusalem and Egypt as a matter of imperial policy.

The daiva inscription

The sharpest single text is the daiva inscription of Xerxes (XPh):

"Where formerly the demons (daivas) were worshipped, there I worshipped Ahuramazda and Arta reverently." (Xerxes I, Persepolis, XPh)^[14]

Read literally, a sanctuary of the "false gods" is thrown down and the worship of the Wise Lord established in its place. Xerxes says as much: "Afterwards, by the favor of Ahuramazda, I destroyed that sanctuary of the demons, and I made proclamation, 'The demons shall not be worshipped!'"^[14] But the text never says where, and readings diverge widely. Some sought the daiva-sanctuary in a specific rebel temple Xerxes is known to have destroyed, the Esagila in Babylon or the Athenian Acropolis, but Boyce objects that Herodotus shows Xerxes ordering Athenian exiles back up the burnt Acropolis to "offer sacrifice after their manner", so he plainly did not perform Iranian rites there, and the Esagila lay in ruins until the dynasty fell; she reads daiva instead as Avestan daēva, an internal act of Zoroastrian zeal suppressing among Iranians the worship of the warlike daēvas the prophet had denounced (a reading developed by Bianchi). Others (Kellens, Herrenschmidt) treat the passage as a formulaic, ideological statement of the king against disorder rather than a report of a particular event.^[15] The inscription closes not in triumph but in exhortation, promising blessedness to whoever keeps the law the Wise Lord has established:

"Thou who shalt be hereafter, have respect for that law which Ahuramazda has established; worship Ahuramazda and Arta reverently. The man who has respect for that law which Ahuramazda has established, and worships Ahuramazda and Arta reverently, he both becomes happy while living, and becomes blessed when dead." (Xerxes I, Persepolis, XPh)^[14]

The location and the literal reality remain unresolved; what is not in doubt is the theology, the Wise Lord and arta set against the demons and the Lie.

In the Gāthās

In the Gāthās the Wise Lord is apprehended as the one uncreated God, Creator and upholder of aša, "the all-seeing Lord" who "is not to be deceived".^[16] Zarathustra addresses him through a sequence of rhetorical questions that amount to a hymn on creation:

"This I ask Thee, tell me truly, Lord. Who in the beginning, at creation, was Father of Order? Who established the course of sun and stars? Through whom does the moon wax, then wane? Who has upheld the earth from below, and the heavens from falling? Who harnessed swift steeds to wind and clouds? What craftsman created light and darkness?" (Gāthās, Yasna 44.3–5, trans. Boyce)^[16]

The liturgy that surrounds the Gāthās keeps the same emphasis, that all good things are of the one Lord's making: "we now worship Ahura Mazda, who created cattle and order (asha), created waters and good plants, created light and earth and all things good" (Yasna 37).^[16] Alongside God the prophet apprehended an adversary, uncreated like him, and in that sense his "twin", the Hostile Spirit, later named Angra Mainyu. The most quoted verse sets the choice at the origin of the moral world:

"Now the two primal Spirits, who reveal themselves in vision as Twins, are the Better and the Bad, in thought and word and action. And between these two the wise ones chose aright, the foolish not so." (Gāthās, Yasna 30.3, trans. Bartholomae)^[17]

Boyce's rendering of the same hymn continues the drama past the choice, to the demons who chose wrongly and the end in which the Lie is undone:

"Of these two Spirits the Wicked One chose achieving the worst things. The Most Holy Spirit, who is clad in hardest stone, chose right. The Daevas indeed did not choose rightly between these two, for the Deceiver approached them as they conferred. And then may we be those who shall transfigure this world, Mazda, who shall deliver the Lie into the hands of Truth." (Gāthās, Yasna 30.5–8, trans. Boyce)^[16]

A point of doctrine matters here, and is often got wrong. In the received Zoroastrian tradition Ahura Mazdā creates through his Bounteous Spirit, Spənta Mainyu, and it is Angra Mainyu who is his uncreated adversary; the two "twins" of Yasna 30.3 are the Bounteous and the Hostile, not God and the devil. The reading that makes Ahura Mazdā himself the father of both good and evil spirits, and so the ultimate source of evil, was a nineteenth-century interpretation by the German orientalist Martin Haug, reached "at his own desk" and expounded in lectures at Bombay in the 1860s, where it was gratefully adopted by Parsi reformists answering Christian critics.^[16] Boyce calls it the "European heresy", inspired ultimately by the old Zurvanite speculation (below), and notes that it has no basis in the tradition, which insists on "the separate origin of light and darkness". The first of the god's own creative acts was to bring into being the six great Beings, the Aməša Spəntas or "Holy Immortals", aspects of his own nature who with the Holy Spirit make a mighty heptad; each enters as guardian into one of the seven creations, man being the special creation of Ahura Mazdā.^[16]

The Zoroastrian question

Were the Achaemenid kings, then, Zoroastrians? The Greek writers make it reasonably clear that the later kings were; the religion of the early kings, Cyrus, Cambyses and Darius, is the long-debated question. The strongest case for continuity was made by Mary Boyce, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica articles "Ahura Mazdā" and "Achaemenid Religion" and at length in her History of Zoroastrianism.^[2][12][3] Boyce marshals several strands. The royal theophoric names: an Achaemenid Arsames of about 600 named a son Vištāspa, the name of Zoroaster's own patron, and Cyrus named his daughter Hutaosā (the Greek Atossa), the name of that patron's queen, which she takes as a public declaration of allegiance. The redating of Zoroaster's "traditional date": Shahbazi argued that the "258 years before Alexander" was probably reckoned from the Seleucid era and so no longer forces the prophet into Cyrus's own lifetime.^[1] The fire-holders excavated at Pasargadae by Cyrus's tomb, an installation particular to Zoroastrian practice. And the funerary iconography at Naqsh-e Rostam, where the winged khvarnah, the fire, and the six attendant nobles, read as mirroring the six Aməša Spəntas, compose a scene Boyce reads as "profoundly Zoroastrian" and reproduced over every royal tomb.

Against this stands the caution of other scholars. No royal text names the prophet, uses the words yazata or spənta, or shows a distinctively Gāthic doctrine as against the common Old Iranian worship of a great Ahura Mazdā; the argument from theophoric names proves devotion to the Wise Lord, not adherence to Zoroaster's specific reform; and modern reverence for Cyrus can colour the debate. The prudent middle term, widely used, is Mazdaean, devoted to Ahura Mazdā within the old Iranian religious world from which Zoroastrianism grew, with the exact relationship to the reform left open. The balance of opinion in the field runs from Boyce's strong continuity at one end to the sceptics' minimal "Old Iranian Mazda-worship" at the other, with most recent handbooks settling near the cautious middle.

Worship

Worship of Ahura Mazdā used no images and no temples in the Achaemenid period. The outsider's eye of Herodotus caught it precisely:

"The Persians have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly." (Herodotus 1.131, trans. Rawlinson)^[11]

Instead the Persians went up to the high places, "called the whole vault of heaven Zeus", and sacrificed with a magus chanting over the offering, honouring fire, water and the elements. Herodotus' account (1.131f.) also gives, as Boyce noted, the earliest description of the Zoroastrian purity laws in action, the killing of noxious creatures, the avoidance of polluting water, the exposure of the dead.^[3] Darius's inscriptions mention āyadanā, "places of worship", but no temple remains of the early period have been found, which fits Herodotus exactly. The sacred fire was tended in the open, on stone fire-holders, not in the enclosed fire-temple of the later, Sasanian faith, which is an anachronism when read back. The ethic Herodotus reports is the same the inscriptions carve: Persian sons were reared "in three things only, in riding, in shooting, and in speaking the truth" (1.136), and "the most disgraceful thing in the world" was "to tell a lie" (1.138).^[11]

In Greek eyes

The Greeks knew the Wise Lord as Ōromasdēs (Horomazes), and regularly "translated" his name as Zeus. The proper name is first attested in the fourth century, in the Platonic Alcibiades (1.121), where the Persian prince is taught "the Magian lore of Zoroaster, son of Horomazes, and that is the worship of the gods".^[18] A fragment of Aristotle's lost On Philosophy gives the earliest philosophical statement of the dualism:

"The magi acknowledge two first principles, a good spirit and an evil spirit, the one called Zeus and Oromasdes, the other Hades and Areimanius." (Aristotle, On Philosophy, Fr. 6)^[18]

Plutarch, writing much later but drawing on Theopompus and other Hellenistic sources, gives the fullest account: Oromazes "born from the purest light" and Areimanios from the darkness, at war with one another, with Mithras set between them as mediator; Oromazes creates six gods (of good will, truth, good order, wisdom, wealth, and beauty), Areimanios an equal number of rivals, and at the destined end Areimanios "the bringer of plague and famine" is destroyed, after which "one way of life and one government shall arise of all men, who shall be happy".^[18] The correspondences with the Aməša Spəntas and with the final renovation are close enough to show that the Greeks were reporting a real Iranian theology, however refracted through Greek names and categories, and mostly at a date later than the kings themselves (see the evaluation on the Herodotus entry).

From Mazdā to Ohrmazd

In later Zoroastrianism the Wise Lord becomes Ohrmazd, and the dualism hardens into cosmic war, the wholly good creator against Ahriman (Angra Mainyu), moving to a final renovation of the world. A rival, monist speculation, Zurvanism, probably evolved among Persian magi in the late fifth century BCE, made both Ohrmazd and Ahriman the twin sons of Zurvan, "Time"; its earliest witness is the Greek historian Theopompus, and the fourth-century Zoroastrian calendar, dedicating days and a winter month to Ahura Mazdā as Creator, seems to bear its stamp. Orthodoxy rejected the monism and kept "the separate origin of light and darkness". After the Achaemenid period the god who had had no image began to be shown, worshipped with images in Parthian Armenia as "Aramazd", and in Sasanian investiture reliefs as a dignified crowned figure who hands the ring of rule to the king, sometimes bearing the priests' barsom. But the central figure is continuous, the Wise Lord who made the good world and human happiness within it and sustains its order against the Lie, from the prophet's hymns, through the carved words of the kings, to the fire-temples of Sasanian Iran and the living Zoroastrian faith.