Persian Empire
Deep Dive 8 min read

Persian Mythology and Ahura Mazda: The Wise Lord and the Zoroastrian Pantheon

Two things are usually said about the Persian mythological system. The first is that it is essentially the Zoroastrian one: Ahura Mazda, the Amesha Spentas, the yazatas, the daevas, all the vocabulary of the Avesta. The second is that the Persian tradition has a clear single source and a clean line of development. Both are partly right, and both are partly wrong. The mythological material in the Bundahishn, the Denkard, the Zand-i Wahman Yasn, and the Yashts is genuinely a system, but the system has been edited, glossed, and at points contradicted by the editorial work of nine centuries. The Achaemenid kings, the Parthian dynasty, and the Sasanian church each used the mythology in different ways for different ends. What follows is an account of the canonical Zoroastrian system, with attention to where the sources are firm, where they are thin, and where the consensus has shifted.

The standard scholarly accounts I work from are Mary Boyce’s Zoroastrians (1975) and History of Zoroastrianism (1991–), Gherardo Gnoli’s Zoroaster’s Time and Homeland (1980), Shaul Shaked’s Dualism in Transformation (1994), and the philological work of Jean Kellens and Prods Oktor Skjærvø. Michael Stausberg’s Zoroastrianism (2022) is the most recent overview, and Almut Hintze’s The Zand i Wahman Yasn (2009) is the standard on the eschatological material. The Encyclopaedia Iranica articles by Yuhan Vevaina and others are the first place to look on contested points. For the Achaemenid period specifically, Mark Garrison’s work on the Persepolis Fortification Tablets and the cult at Persepolis, and Wouter Henkelman’s recent articles, are reshaping the picture in interesting ways.

For the connected topics, see the clusters on Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and the Magi.

Ahura Mazda

The name Ahura Mazda — Old Persian Auramazdā, Avestan Ahura Mazdā — is composed of Ahura (“Lord,” cognate with the Vedic Asura) and Mazdā (“Wise” or “Wisdom”). The Wise Lord. The Gathic Zarathustra addresses him directly, repeatedly, as a man addresses his lord. The Achaemenid kings, from Darius I onward, invoke Auramazdā at the head of nearly every inscription as the god who gave them the kingship. The Achaemenid Auramazdā is, on the strict reading of the inscriptional evidence, not the full Zoroastrian pantheon. The Amesha Spentas are not named. Zarathustra is not named. The Gathas are not cited. The Achaemenid religion was, in Shaked’s careful phrasing, a “Magi-mediated” form of what would later be codified as Zoroastrianism.

The doctrine of the Amesha Spentas is the heart of the later theology. The six are divine attributes personified: Vohu Manah (Good Mind), Asha Vahishta (Best Truth or Righteousness), Khshathra Vairya (Desirable Dominion), Spenta Armaiti (Holy Devotion or Benevolent Piety), Haurvatat (Wholeness), and Ameretat (Immortality). Each presides over a creation. Good Mind over animals. Best Truth over fire. Desirable Dominion over metals. Holy Devotion over earth. Wholeness over water. Immortality over plants. The Bundahishn sets out the developed system. The order in which the six are listed varies in different liturgical contexts; the most common liturgical order is the one I have given.

The figure of Asha Vahishta is the most theologically loaded. Asha — truth, righteousness, the way things are supposed to be — is the central concept of the Indo-Iranian tradition, cognate with the Vedic Rta. To choose asha against the druj (the Lie) is, in the Gathas, the founding act of the Zoroastrian tradition, and the fire of Asha is the central symbol of the Zoroastrian ritual. The fire altar, the atash of Asha Vahishta, is the visible centre of the temple.

Kellens has argued, in his editions of the Gathas, that Spenta Armaiti was originally a feminine figure associated with the earth — the armaiti- root in Avestan is feminine, and the figure has a strong earth-mother resonance. The later tradition, with the gender of the Amesha Spentas homogenised, treats the six as masculine abstractions. I find Kellens more persuasive on the philology, but the orthodox reading is not nonsense; the Bundahishn simply operates at a higher level of abstraction than the Gathas.

Angra Mainyu and the daevas

The cosmic opponent is Angra Mainyu — the Destructive Spirit, which in later Pahlavi becomes Ahriman. The relationship between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu is the central question of Zoroastrian dualism, and the answer depends on the period and the source.

In the orthodox tradition as represented by the Bundahishn and the Denkard, Angra Mainyu is independent and co-eternal with Ahura Mazda. He exists from the beginning, attacks the creation at the moment of its making, and will be defeated at the Frashokereti (the final renovation). The Gathic evidence is more ambiguous. Some passages treat Angra Mainyu as an internal principle of opposition; others as a near-independent attacker. The Zurvanite tradition — see the long-tail on Zurvanism — derived both spirits from a primordial Zurvan (Time) and treated Angra Mainyu as a kind of accident within the divine. The Bundahishn was compiled in large part to refute the Zurvanite position, which the orthodox church condemned as a heresy.

The daevas are the demons who serve Angra Mainyu. The term is a striking piece of evidence for the Gathic reform. In the older Indo-Iranian tradition, the daevas were the bright gods, the ones invoked at the Soma sacrifice. Zarathustra’s reform demonised them. The Vedic equivalent deva continued to mean “god” in Sanskrit; the Iranian daeva became “demon.” The major daevas in the late tradition include Aka Manah (Evil Mind, the antithesis of Vohu Manah), Indra (the Vedic god of war, who in Iran is a demon of war and violence), Saurva (a demon of storm, from the Vedic Sarva), Nasu (the demon of the corpse), and Az (the demon of greed). The principal daevas in the late tradition are the daevas of wrath (Aesma, Aeshma), falsehood (Druj), and violence (Aka Manah).

The yazatas

The yazatas are the divine servants of Ahura Mazda and the protectors of the cosmic order. The list is long. Mithra (yazata of the sun, of contracts, of justice) is the most theologically significant. Anahita (yazata of the waters, of fertility, of healing) is the most beautiful of the hymns, by my reading — the Ardvisur Yasht (Yasht 5) is a piece of religious poetry of real power. Verethragna (yazata of victory, the Iranian Vṛθragna with ten forms) is the most martial. Tishtrya (yazata of the rain and the star Sirius), Rashnu (yazata of justice, the weigher of souls), Sraosha (yazata of obedience, the guardian of the night), Atar (yazata of fire), Aban (yazata of the waters), Zam (yazata of the earth), Vayu (yazata of the air), Ashi (yazata of fortune), Khvarenah (yazata of the royal glory), Mah (yazata of the moon), and Anagran (the eternal fire) are the other named figures. The full list runs to over thirty. The yazatas are the subjects of the Yashts, and the corpus of twenty-one hymns is, in effect, the mythology book of the Zoroastrian tradition.

The doctrine of the Saoshyant — the future saviour, born of the seed of Zarathustra preserved in a lake in the Elburz mountains — is post-Gathic. The Saoshyant will preside over the Frashokereti, the resurrection and the final defeat of evil. The idea of a virgin birth of the Saoshyant is a Zand development, not in the Gathas themselves; the Gathas expect a righteous king or general of Iranian tradition. The parallel with Christian and Islamic messianism is real but comparative, not genealogical — a point Shaked and Stausberg have both made clearly.

The Pahlavi sources and the cosmogony

The most extensive Pahlavi sources for Persian mythology are the Bundahishn (ninth or tenth century, in MacKenzie’s dating the “greater” Iranian Bundahishn is ninth century, the “lesser” Indian is later), the Denkard (ninth century, a compendium of Zoroastrian doctrine), the Zand-i Wahman Yasn (the Pahlavi commentary on the Bahman Yasht, a key text on Zoroastrian apocalypticism), the Arda Viraf Namag (a vision-text of the late Sasanian period), and the Mēnōg i Xrad (the Spirit of Wisdom, a piece of Sasanian wisdom literature). The Bundahishn describes the world as the creation of Ahura Mazda, who, after a long preparatory period, brought forth the primal bull and the primal man, Gayomart. Angra Mainyu, breaking into the world, killed the primal bull and the primal man and introduced death and decay. From the seed of the primal bull, all the animals descended; from the seed of the primal man, all humanity.

The Bundahishn is a text in which mythology, cosmology, and antiquarian history are mixed, and it was the principal source for the European study of Zoroastrianism from Anquetil-Duperron’s Zend-Avesta (1771) onwards. The text is now in good critical editions by Mehrdad Bahar, Bahman Furuzanfar, and the Danish scholar MacKenzie’s Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (1971) for the vocabulary. The translations of the Bundahishn by Behramgore Anklesaria (1956) and by D. N. MacKenzie (1990) are the standard English versions.

Iranian mythology in Western Asia

The Persian mythological system had a substantial influence on the religions of Western Asia, and the question of exactly how much is strongly contested in the field.

The figure of Angra Mainyu, as Ahriman in the Middle Persian, is the immediate ancestor of the Satan of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition. The Bundahishn’s account of the daevas shaped Mani’s demonology. The Mithraic cult became, in its Roman form, one of the great mystery religions of late antiquity. The angelology of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has been compared to the Zoroastrian yazata system, though the parallel is not a direct borrowing; the figure of the angel in Hebrew is malʾakh, a separate tradition. The Magi of the Gospel of Matthew, the three kings who followed the star from the East, are best read as astrologer-priests in the broader Iranian sense rather than as members of a specific Zoroastrian priesthood.

A more careful comparison: the four-element theory of Empedocles is Greek, not Persian; the doctrine of the chain of being is Aristotelian; the figure of the cosmic battle between order and chaos is much older than Zoroaster and is found in Babylonian, Vedic, and Greek sources. The Zoroastrian contribution to the western religious tradition is real but partial. The dualism, the eschatology, the angelology, the daeva demonology, the Saoshyant messianism, and the Chinvat bridge are elements that passed into the religious vocabulary of late antiquity in ways that are still being worked out by Boyce, Shaked, Ginzberg, and others.

For further reading

  • Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1975).
  • Gnoli, Gherardo. Zoroaster’s Time and Homeland (1980).
  • Shaked, Shaul. Dualism in Transformation (1994).
  • Kellens, Jean. Les Gâthâ (2013) and the essays collected as Zoroastrianism in the Greek Sources (2013).
  • Skjærvø, Prods Oktor. The Spirit of Zoroastrianism (2011).
  • Stausberg, Michael. Zoroastrianism (2022).
  • Hintze, Almut. The Zand i Wahman Yasn (2009).
  • MacKenzie, D. N. A Concise Pahlavi Dictionary (1971).
  • Russell, James R. Zoroastrianism in Armenia (1987), for the Armenian sources on Zurvanism.
  • Vevaina, Yuhan S.-D., and the Encyclopaedia Iranica articles on the Bundahishn, the Amesha Spentas, and Angra Mainyu.