Ahura Mazdā

In Old Persian the name is written Auramazdā (𐎠𐎢𐎼𐎶𐏀𐎭𐎠), name and title fused into a single word. It joins two Iranian elements: ahura, "lord", and mazdā, connected with wisdom or the placing of things in mind. The classical modern rendering is "the Wise Lord", or, reading mazdā as a substantive, "Lord Wisdom": A. V. W. Jackson interpreted mazdā as a noun corresponding to the Vedic feminine medhā, "mental vigour, perceptive power, wisdom", and rendered the name accordingly, the reading Mary Boyce adopted and F. B. J. Kuiper examined at length.^[1][2] It is not unanimous: Prods Oktor Skjærvø renders the god "the All-knowing (ruling) Lord", taking mazdāh as an adjective, "he who places (everything) in his mind", and expressly "not 'wisdom,' as commonly rendered".^[3]

The form of the name carries real historical information. In the Gāthās the two elements are still separate and separable words, often in reverse order ("Mazdā... Ahura"); by the Achaemenid inscriptions they have fused into one.^[3] Wouter Henkelman notes the difference from the Gathic usage but rests his judgement more broadly: regardless of the onomastic question, "it is preferable to take 'Auramazdā' as an Achaemenid god in his own right", rather than assuming the royal god is simply the Gathic God under another spelling.^[4] The fusion itself, Boyce argued, testifies to devotion: a name so often invoked that it wore into one word.^[5]

Behind both stands the shared religion of the Indo-Iranians, in which the ahura/asura lords stood beside the daiva/deva gods. The two branches diverged in opposite directions: in India the devas remained gods and asura drifted toward "demon", while in Iran the ahuras were exalted and the daivas demonised. Boyce reconstructed an Indo-Iranian triad in which "the Lord Wisdom is the highest of the three gods, solitary and very powerful", standing above the pair Mithra and the reconstructed Vouruna: "The Asura thus appears raised above Mitra and Varuna, as Ahura Mazda is above the Iranian Mithra."^[1] On her reading the god was a moral deity before Zarathustra ever preached: "even before Zoroaster became his prophet the Lord Mazda was a moral deity".^[1] The earliest possible trace of the name in the west is an Assyrian god-list of the eighth or seventh century BCE naming as-sa-ra ma-za-áš, "held to be preserved" as the name of the greatest of the Ahuras, centuries before Cyrus.^[5]

The tradition itself weighed the name, and its gloss bears on the modern dispute. The Ohrmazd Yašt, the hymn of the names that opens the Younger Avestan collection, is in Darmesteter's summary "exclusively devoted to an enumeration of the names of Ahura and to a laudation of their virtues and efficacy: the recitation of these names is the best defence against all dangers"; asked by Zarathustra for the most powerful part of the Holy Word, the god answers with his own names, "the strongest part of the Holy Word", and enumerates twenty of them.^[6] The list ends, "My twentieth name is Mazda (the All-knowing One)", and in the Yašt's second list the pair is glossed from within, "My name is Ahura (the Lord)" standing beside "Mazdāu (the all-knowing)".^[6] The received tradition's own onomastics, that is, put mazdā on the side of knowing rather than of a substantive Wisdom, anticipating Skjærvø's "All-knowing Lord" more nearly than the classical "Lord Wisdom".

Because the empire wrote in many languages, the Wise Lord is attested under many spellings: Old Persian Auramazdā in the monumental cuneiform; Elamite U-ra-maš-da (in the Persepolis archive, Uramasda); Imperial Aramaic ʾhwrmzd (𐡀𐡄𐡅𐡓𐡌𐡆𐡃), including in the Aramaic version of the Behistun text circulated to the provinces; Greek Ōromasdēs or Oromazes, forms that render the Old Persian, not the Avestan, shape of the name^[7]; later Armenian Aramazd and Middle Persian Ohrmazd. That spread is itself evidence: the god of the dynasty's proclamations was also a name handled in the working paperwork of the state.

One substitution is more telling still. In the Babylonian version of the Behistun inscription set up at Babylon, the scribes replaced the god outright: "In every place where Darius refers to Auramazda at Bisitun, the Babylon version seems to have substituted the chief Babylonian god, Bel-Marduk."^[8] Ahura Mazdā, in other words, was translatable, as the high royal god of one people corresponds to the high royal god of another. The editors of the 2017 Persepolis colloquium draw the structural conclusion: such a substitution "would have been difficult without a conception of Auramazdā as a royal god according to a model well-documented in Elam, Babylonia and particularly Assyria".^[9] The god of the inscriptions belongs, on this view, to a recognisable ancient Near Eastern type, the dynastic god of a royal house, like Aššur or Marduk, more than to any uniquely Iranian theology.

The same translatability reached the Hebrew Bible. Philip Davies extends the logic of the Behistun substitution to Second Isaiah and the god of Yehud:

Or, under the Persians, like Marduk in the Cyrus Cylinder, his name can be used (Isa 45:1) in place of Ahuramazda as the god who commissioned Cyrus. The idea of a single imperial god responsible for a unified world political system, represented in various divine names and figures, is as natural a conception as the idea of the national royal god had been in the days of smaller kingdoms. Monarchic theism becomes imperial theism.

Davies, 'Monotheism, Empire, and the Cult(s) of Yehud', 2016^[10]

On this reading the empire's many deities took new roles, "as angels, as local manifestations, or even merely as alternative names of the imperial god"; Davies himself flags the contrary case, argued by Lowell Handy in the same volume, that Achaemenid religion was not monotheistic in nature and so should not be sought as the source of monotheism.^[10]

In the Gāthās, the seventeen Old Avestan hymns at the core of the Zoroastrian liturgy, Ahura Mazdā is apprehended as the one uncreated God: creator, moral orderer, and "the all-seeing Lord" who cannot be cheated. "I know the Wise One who created it to be the Father of effective good thinking," runs Insler's rendering of Yasna 45.4, "...The All-viewing Lord is not to be deceived."^[11] M. L. West, whose translation renders the god "the Mindful Lord", characterises him as "a deity identified not by an opaque conventional name, like the old gods, but by reference to his essential quality of attentiveness or intelligence. His intelligence is creative and supervisory. He created this world, or at any rate what is good in it, by means of his thought."^[12]

The most sustained statement of his creatorship is a chain of rhetorical questions, Yasna 44:

This I ask Thee, tell me straight, Lord: who was the father-begetter of Right in the beginning? Who set the path of the sun and stars? Who is it through whom the moon waxes or wanes?... Who held the earth from beneath, and the heavens from falling down? Who the waters and plants? Who yoked the wind's and the clouds' swift pair?... What skilful artificer made the light and the darkness? What skilful artificer made sleep and waking?

Gāthās, Yasna 44.3–5, trans. West^[12]

The questions expect one answer. West notes that the poet "leaves them open", but that everything points to "the Mindful Lord" as "ordainer of all things through his bounteous will".^[12] The prophet grasps the god as both primordial and present: "although Thou art the First One, I realized Thee to be (ever) young in mind, Wise One, when I grasped Thee in a vision to be the Father of good thinking, the real Creator of truth, (and) the Lord of existence in Thy actions" (Yasna 31.8, trans. Insler).^[11] And as moral judge from the beginning to the end of things: "I saw Thee to be the First One at the creation of the world, and when I saw that Thou didst determine actions as well as words to have their prizes, namely, bad for the bad, a good reward for the good, (each to be given) through Thy skill at the final turning point of creation" (Yasna 43.5, trans. Insler).^[11]

Alongside God the Gāthās set an adversary, and the terms in which they do so have shaped every later argument about the god's nature. The pivotal text is Yasna 30.3, here in Insler's rendering beside Bartholomae's classic one:

Yes, there are two fundamental spirits, twins which are renowned to be in conflict. In thought and in word, in action, they are two: the good and the bad. And between these two, the beneficent have correctly chosen, not the maleficent.

Gāthās, Yasna 30.3, trans. Insler^[11]

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^[13]

Of these two, "the deceitful one chose to bring to realization the worst things", while "the very virtuous spirit, who is clothed in the hardest stones, chose the truth" (Yasna 30.5, trans. Insler); the daēvas, the old gods, "did not at all choose correctly between these two, since the deceptive one approached them as they were deliberating", and so "rushed into fury, with which they have afflicted the world and mankind" (Yasna 30.6, trans. Insler).^[11]

A point of doctrine is often got wrong here. In the received tradition the "twins" are the Bounteous Spirit (Spənta Mainyu) and the Hostile Spirit (Angra Mainyu), not God and the devil: Ahura Mazdā creates through his Bounteous Spirit, and his adversary is uncreated, co-eval, and unrelated to him. Boyce states the orthodox reading plainly: the good twin "is evidently Ahura Mazda himself", the term "twins" being "a metaphor to express the equality in state of the two unrelated beings, and their coevity", and it remains "doctrinally utterly alien to the Gathas... that evil should in any way originate from Ahura Mazda".^[1] The god creates "through (his) Bounteous Spirit" (spəṇtā mainyū vīspanąm dātār-, "Creator of all things through the Bounteous Spirit").^[1] West puts the awkwardness and its history in one sentence: "As in another poem (30.3) the good and bad Wills are called twins, it ought to follow that Ahura Mazdā was also the father of the bad one. But Zoroaster never intended this conclusion, and it was left to later Zoroastrians to draw it and wrestle with it."^[12] The reading that makes Ahura Mazdā the father of both spirits, and so the source of evil, was drawn in antiquity by the Zurvanites (below) and revived in the nineteenth century by Martin Haug; Boyce called it the "European heresy", and held it to have no basis in the orthodox tradition, whose ancient sponsors were precisely the heterodox Zurvanites.^[14] Nor is the orthodox reading a modern recovery. Mills's Sacred Books of the East apparatus already stated it in 1887, a century before Boyce restated it against Haug: introducing the two spirits as "not two persons, or at least not only two persons, but a better thing, or principle, and a worse one", with the pointed note that "the name Angra Mainyu does not occur in this section"; observing of Yasna 30.5 that "Ahura is undoubtedly called spenista mainyu", the most bounteous spirit; and drawing the doctrinal moral that "a good God cannot be responsible for permanent evil; that imperfection and suffering are original, and inherent in the nature of things".^[15] Haug's monism, a departure from the two-Spirits doctrine, was the nineteenth century's novelty. The tradition itself, in the end, completed a different merger: in the Bundahišn, the Pahlavi cosmogony, the Bounteous Spirit is absorbed into God outright, being there, as E. W. West noted, "represented by Auharmazd himself".^[16]

Humbach's commentary adds a detail with a long afterlife: Yasna 47, the hymn to the Bounteous Spirit, is the only Gathic stanza-group naming all six of the divine entities who in the Younger Avesta form the Aməša Spəntas, the "Holy Immortals", and "it is possible that the YAv. series originated from this stanza, establishing the well-known canonical order by omitting Spenta Mainyu. This must have required much theological debate."^[17] The heptad of God and his six great Beings, each guardian of one of the seven creations, became a fixed structure of the faith, and, some have argued, a template legible even in Achaemenid court imagery (below).

The standard Achaemenid royal text opens by invoking Ahura Mazdā as creator, in a formula repeated with little variation from Darius I to Artaxerxes III. On Darius's tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam it runs:

A great god is Ahuramazda, who created this earth, who created yonder sky, who created man, who created happiness for man, who made Darius king, one king of many, one lord of many.

Darius I, DNa §1, trans. Kent^[18]

The last term of the creation is doctrinally pointed. The god creates the world, and happiness with it (Old Persian šiyāti, "well-being, blessedness"), and, as Boyce observed, in Zoroaster's teaching the supreme Lord creates only what is good: "According to Zoroaster's teachings the supreme Lord is the Creator only of what is good, whereas to the Jewish prophet Yahweh is the 'author alike of prosperity and trouble'."^[5] The formula's shape recurs in the liturgy itself: Skjærvø sets the royal text beside Yasna 37.1, "we are sacrificing to the All-knowing Lord, who, by his command, greatness, and artistries set in place the Cow and Order, the good waters and the plants, the lights and the earth, and all good things", and argues that the inscriptions "contain numerous Avestan echoes and, probably, more or less direct citations".^[3]

The same praise opens the twin texts on the tomb's upper register and at Susa: "A great god (is) Auramazda, who created this excellent (work) which one sees; who created happiness for man; who bestowed wisdom and energy upon Darius/Xerxes the king" (DNb and its Xerxes duplicate XPl, trans. Kuhrt).^[19] Creation and kingship are one act of the divine will, and against the world's disorder the god raises the king as remedy:

Auramazda, when he saw this earth in commotion, thereafter bestowed it upon me, made me king; I am king.

Darius I, DNa §4, trans. Kuhrt^[18]

The king prays in turn that the creator keep the good creation from the three faces of disorder:

May Ahuramazda protect this country from a (hostile) army, from famine, from the Lie!

Darius I, DPd §3, trans. Kent^[20]

Enemy, dearth and falsehood are held off by the creator through his king, and the blessing asked is not conquest but continuance: "if the Persian people shall be protected, thereafter for the longest while happiness unbroken—this will by Ahura come down upon this royal house" (DPe §3, trans. Kent).^[20]

Bruce Lincoln has supplied the formula's grammar of history. Five creations are named, and the inscriptions set the fifth apart in two ways: "while the first four creations came into being at some unspecified moment in primordial eternity, the Wise Lord made Darius king at a precise historical moment: 29 September 522"; and where the four primordial acts take the solemn verb dā-, "to create", the god's "intervention in history via the election and investiture of Darius" takes "a less discriminating verb, kar-", to make or do. Kingship, on this reading, is a remedial act within history: "making Darius king seems to have been something like a divine afterthought: the Wise Lord's response to some unexpected event or his attempt to redress some newly arisen problem".^[21] The commotion of DNa §4 is exactly such a problem, and in Lincoln's frame the whole royal cosmology closes on the same figure: in Achaemenid discourse "cosmogony and eschatology converge... on the same historical figure, for the myth of creation ends when the Wise Lord made Darius king, just as the Renovation begins with the wonder that Darius produced in his palace at Susa".^[21]

The happiness of the formula has likewise been given its full doctrinal weight. Following Clarisse Herrenschmidt, Lincoln reads the three menaces of Darius's prayer as the negations of the three goods whose sum is šiyāti: "the enemy army disrupts peace, while famine is scarcity of food", and most heinous of all is the Lie; "Protection effectively negates these negations, thereby ensuring the three primary goods: peace, (abundant) food, and truth. It is this state that is construed as happiness."^[21] The Achaemenid accent differs from the Avestan in tense: where Zoroastrian usage mostly places šyāta-happiness in the righteous soul's hereafter, the Achaemenids, he writes, understood happiness as "the original and proper state of mankind, as per the Wise Lord's intentions", lost in the interval between the creation and the accession; and to truth and ritual speech, the two means of happiness the Avesta knows, the inscriptions add a third, obedience to the king's god-given law.^[21]

The "excellent (work) which one sees" of DNb, quoted above, also carries a loaded word: the Old Persian is frasha, "wonder", and in a small group of texts the wonder replaces earth and sky in the creation formula itself, "who makes a wonder on this earth" (DSs, with the verb kar- in the present tense), "who created this wonder that is seen" (DNb, XPl).^[21] Lincoln draws the eschatological connection: frašgird (Avestan frašō-kərəti), "Wondermaking", "is the technical term that denotes the Renovation", and "That the same word should be used to describe the original and the final perfection of the material cosmos is not particularly surprising... the Zoroastrian texts make the point that the world's salvation from evil accomplishes nothing novel", so that a wondrous cosmos, happiness for mankind and the Wise Lord "fill the eternity of the future, just as they fill the eternity of the past".^[21] The king's building, in this reading, is proto-eschatology: the wonder made at Susa rehearses, within history, the Wondermaking at its end.

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

By the favor of Ahuramazda I am King; Ahuramazda bestowed the kingdom upon me.

Darius I, DB §5, trans. Kent^[22]

The narrative repeats "Ahuramazda bore me aid" like a refrain after every battle, so that the suppression of the 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).^[22] At Susa the foundation charter makes the god's election personal: "Ahuramazda, the greatest of the gods—he created me; he made me king; he bestowed upon me this kingdom, great, possessed of good horses, possessed of good men" (DSf §3).^[23] And a short Susa text compresses the whole relation into a formula whose bluntness startles: "Mine is Auramazdā, Auramazdā's am I – Auramazdā I venerated, may Auramazdā bring me aid" (DSk). Henkelman comments that this "describes a royal god, a deity analogous to Aššur, Marduk, and Inšušinak".^[4]

To rebel against the king is therefore to side with the Lie against the god's order, and Darius can 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" (DB §72).^[22] What that charge means has been re-read in the light of the fuller record. Kuhrt's judgement is that "What he meant by this is that the rebels threatened the god-defined imperial order and thus had to be punished, not that their religious practices were offensive to the Persian ruler."^[8] Henkelman generalises: rebellion construed as failure to venerate Auramazdā points not to "a state-enforced cult (for which there is no evidence), nor a prohibition of worship of other deities (who were actively endorsed in and outside the heartland), but a political discourse in which Auramazdā became the patron of the imperial project".^[4]

Whether these formulas amount to a theology has itself been argued. Jason Silverman, asking whether there was an Achaemenid "theology" of kingship, answers by constructing one and naming its parts: Lincoln "would characterize it as a combination of dualism, election, and soteriological mission"; Silverman would avoid "dualism", a "slippery and much abused term", and prefers to election "glory or fortune, in the farnah sense, which combines both election and perceived merit". His own label borrows from biblical studies: "one could characterize this theology as a deferred eschatology, or perhaps as a 'realized eschatology'", in which "the kings play an integral part in Ahuramazda's plan, acting like saošiiants in bringing the world towards its final fulfilment, both through improvement and through foreshadowing".^[24] What makes the construction distinctive, he argues, is its direction: the empire's order "is a teleological order, a progressive order that contributes to the end (in both senses) of the world", and that teleology "makes the Achaemenid royal theology distinctive from the elements inherited from the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires". On the label he sides with de Jong: calling this theology "Zoroastrian" or not "appears irrelevant", and "it is best to follow de Jong's suggestion... that the Achaemenids were, in fact, formative within the Zoroastrian tradition".^[24]

The god's non-exclusivity has been re-read in the same Near Eastern frame. Where the older literature spoke of a Persian policy of tolerance, and Boyce of a "pragmatic indifference",^[25] two essays in the same 2016 volume dissolve the policy into administration. From the Egyptian evidence Damien Agut-Labordère concludes that "so-called 'Persian religious tolerance' is a historiographical artifice": "Sometimes, real indifference may be deceptively interpreted as tolerance. In fact, the Achaemenid imperial authorities were little concerned with the theological content of the Egyptian religion... For them, temples were political and economic entities."^[26] Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley reaches the same verdict from Babylon, with the Assyrians as control: "Neither the Assyrians nor the Persians fully deserve their reputations: the former for terror, the latter for cultural tolerance", both having responded to the conditions they encountered; "The Persians did not introduce any new and tolerant policies in the city of Babylon or anywhere else they ruled."^[27] The cult policy, on this reading, follows the same inherited Near Eastern model as the royal god himself.

On his tomb Darius turns the theology into the fullest code of royal conduct to survive from the empire (DNb):

By the favor of Ahuramazda I am of such a sort that I am a friend to right, I am not a friend to wrong. It is not my desire that the weak man should have wrong done to him by the mighty, nor is that my desire, that the mighty man should have wrong done to him by the weak.

Darius I, DNb §8a, trans. Kent^[19]

He binds the ideal of right to impartial judgement and hard self-mastery: "I am not a friend to the man who is a Lie-follower. I am not hot-tempered" (§8b), and "What a man says against a man, that does not convince me, until he satisfies the Ordinance of Good Regulations" (§8d).^[19] The single enemy named is the Lie, and at Behistun the ground of the god's favour is stated as innocence of the three royal vices: "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—neither I nor my family" (DB §63).^[22] To his successors Darius leaves the contest 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).^[22] The Old Persian drauga is at once religious and political: as Kuhrt notes, it carries "religious and cosmological undertones, hence it is 'The Lie' and, by implication, a threat to the political order", extending to the meaning "rebellion".^[8]

The first of the three professed innocences turns on a disputed word. Old Persian arika is Kent's "hostile" and Kuhrt's "disloyal"; Lincoln renders it "vulnerable to the Lie", an interpretive translation that carries his thesis and should be read as such. The category was coined, he argues, for the Scythian campaign of Behistun's fifth column, against a people who could not be called rebels or liars:

The Scythians were "vulnerable to the Lie" (Old Persian arika), they charged, which is to say that, although the Lie was not yet manifest in their words and deeds, it had begun penetrating their thoughts and worse was sure to follow. Darius's invasion thus acquired the character of a preemptive strike launched in prudent self-defense against the gathering forces of evil.

Lincoln, Religion, Empire, and Torture, 2007^[21]

On that reading DB §63 professes not innocence of hostility but immunity to corruption, "Because I was not vulnerable to the Lie, I did not speak lies", down to "neither I nor my lineage": the god's aid answers a lineage the Lie cannot enter.^[21]

Boyce read this ethic as Zoroastrian moral theology in action: in dealing even-handed justice Darius "was serving not only Asa Vahista, the great Aməša Spənta who hypostatizes justice and right, but also Khsathra Vairya, who is honoured through all properly exercised authority".^[5] The mapping is hers, not the text's; the inscriptions never name an Aməša Spənta. But the deeper formula does have an Avestan shape. The promise held out by Xerxes to the man who keeps the god's law, happy living and blessedness in death, pairs Old Persian šiyāta with artāvan, and Skjærvø reads the inscriptional pair against the liturgy: "The goal of man is to act in such a way that he becomes happy (shiyâta) while alive (which is what Ahuramazdâ intended for him) and at one with Order (artâvan) when dead."^[28]

Lincoln has pressed the same theology to its darkest consequence. His case study is the ordeal of the troughs, the torture Plutarch reports Artaxerxes II inflicting on the soldier Mithridates, who had boasted of the killing of the rebel Cyrus at Cunaxa that the king claimed for himself. Read through the inscriptions' theology of truth, the horror is organised as a judicial ordeal that divides liar from truthful: "if the king was a liar, the empire—no, the cosmos itself—stood on shifting sand", and the ordeal "was, thus, designed to vindicate the king, reassure all others, and quiet the realm, by publicly convicting Mithridates of unspeakable corruption".^[21] The pains inflicted mirror, on his reading, the pains the Zoroastrian hell holds for the liar, and the royal paradise and the troughs are one system's two poles, the walled garden a model of the perfected cosmos, the ordeal a rehearsal of its purgation.^[21] The imperial ideal itself he reads soteriologically: "Perfecting the world meant... defeating the Lie and conquering all peoples in order to reunite humanity... One was concerned, not to enrich one's self, but to do God's work, restore primordial wholeness, and set right an afflicted cosmos."^[21]

The book divided its reviewers along an instructive line. Skjærvø accepted the summation, the "dualistic ethics according to which everything is either good or bad", the king as God's chosen agent, "the representation of imperial aggression as a soteriological mission", while faulting the religious frame: "Lincoln does not mention the growing trend in scholarship on Zoroastrianism of problematizing the assumption of Zarathustra's historicity and his 'reform'"; measured instead against the whole Avesta, the question whether Achaemenid religion agrees with it earns, "in my opinion", "a qualified yes".^[29]

The royal cult of Ahura Mazdā was supreme but never, on its face, exclusive. Darius invokes him "together with all the gods" (hadā visaibiš bagaibiš, DPd), and in the phrase most pressed by both sides of the debate, "Ahuramazda bore me aid, and the other gods who are" (DB §62).^[22] Yet he never names one of these lesser beings, and Boyce found the reticence eloquent: "he never honours any of these lesser beings by mentioning them by name; and this is the more remarkable in that Zoroaster himself names more than a dozen yazatas in the Gathas".^[5] On her reading the exclusive naming was itself a confession: "By naming him exclusively, Darius therefore publicly affirmed his own adherence to the faith preached by Zoroaster—that is, to Mazda-worship."^[5] Kuhrt's apparatus states the plain epigraphic fact: Auramazdā "is the only god named in the inscriptions of Darius I and II, Xerxes and Artaxerxes I (others are occasionally referred to collectively as 'the gods' or 'all the gods')", and of "the other gods who are" she allows that it "may represent an emphasis on the concerted support, not only of all the gods of Persia, but also of those of the conquered peoples".^[8]

The vocabulary cuts both ways. The word the king uses for the divine beings is baga, rare in the Avesta, not the characteristic Zoroastrian yazata; the royal texts also lack spənta, the name Angra Mainyu, and the name of Zarathustra himself. Whether those silences are doctrinal or generic is one of the hinges of the whole question (see below): Skjærvø's objection to building on them is that "the Avesta... and the Old Persian inscriptions are two fundamentally different kinds of texts: royal proclamations versus ritual texts, as well as in different languages".^[28]

What the debate long lacked was evidence for worship as practised, and that is what the Persepolis Fortification archive supplies: thousands of Elamite administrative records of food commodities disbursed in the Persian heartland under Darius I (c. 509–493 BCE), among them some 250 texts recording state-funded offerings. Since Wouter Henkelman's systematic exploitation of this dossier (2008), no account of Ahura Mazdā can pass it by, and its testimony is startling: the god of the royal inscriptions is a modest presence in the working cult records of his own heartland.

The numbers carry the argument. "Within the now available sample only 10 texts record offerings for Auramazdā, against, e.g., 26 texts with offerings for the originally Elamite god Humban (in a total corpus of ca. 250 texts relating to cultic practices)."^[30] In aggregate volume Humban's lead is greater still: where the two appear side by side, "Humban receives almost three times as much", and one much-cited tablet, PF 0339, allocates seven quarts of wine for Auramazdā against twenty for Humban.^[4][30] The offerings for Auramazdā look "incidental", with no sign of a monthly cult.^[30] Henkelman allows himself the pointed inversion: "if one were inclined to force the matter, one would have to style the Fortification material as predominantly 'Humbanist' rather than predominantly Mazdaic".^[30] Kuhrt's sourcebook absorbs the finding: in the Persepolis documents the god "neither receives the largest quantities nor is he particularly prominent".^[8] Henkelman states the evidential limits himself: "The archive may be selective in content, lopsided in focus and seriously incomplete, but it does not have the disadvantage of the distorting lens of the Greek sources or the ideological overtones of the royal inscriptions. It does not replace these sources, but it certainly does provide a new perspective."^[30]

An older escape from this conclusion has been closed. The archive's commonest and costliest sacrifice, the lan, attested in more texts than any named god, was long read (following Heidemarie Koch) as the state rite of Ahura Mazdā under an elliptical name, which would restore the god's primacy at a stroke. Henkelman showed the two dossiers never touch: "none of the lan texts refers to Auramazdā, and... none of the Auramazdā texts refers to lan", with different amounts, rhythms and officiants on each side.^[30] New texts then settled the matter: the lan is attested being performed for the Elamite great god Napiriša, so the exclusive connection "is falsified", and the rite emerges as "a sacrifice sui generis that probably could be celebrated for a series of deities".^[31][9] With the lan detached, "the position of Auramazdā in the archive appears to be relatively modest, certainly when compared to that of Humban".^[30]

The pantheon the archive funds is a mixed one, Elamite and Iranian gods side by side in the same ration lists: one text has a priest applying wine "for Auramazdā, (the) Mišebaka and Šimut", the Iranian high god sharing a line with the old Elamite herald-god; another records barley "(as) rations/offerings for the gods, ordered by the King" jointly for Auramazdā, Napiriša and Adad, the king himself endowing his god and the Elamite great god together.^[30][4] (An older reading of the divine name Mišebaka as "Mithra-and-the-Baga", which would have put Mithra in the archive, is excluded: the word is Visai-bagā, "All-Gods". Mithra is in fact absent from the edited Fortification texts, for all his ubiquity in personal names.)^[30][31] Even the officiants blur the expected lines: of the eight individuals recorded sacrificing for Auramazdā, five bear the age-old Elamite priestly title šatin and only one is a makuš, a magus.^[30] Henkelman's conclusion is that the heartland's religion was the product of long Elamite-Iranian acculturation, "truly and wholly Persian" precisely in its fusion, and that any "state cult" was the sponsorship of this whole heterogeneous pantheon rather than of one god within it.^[30]

What then was Ahura Mazdā's distinction? Institutional and ideological rather than devotional. He appears in contexts that "underline his closeness to the king and role in royal ideology", among them the bakadaušiyam feasts of the gods at sites with a marked royal profile.^[9] Henkelman suggests he inherited the role of royal god from Humban himself, who had bestowed kitin, god-given royal protection, on Neo-Elamite kings: "In XPhe, his role is taken over by Auramazdā, that other supreme god."^[30] The sober summary is his: the tablets indicate "that Auramazdā was not the predominant god in the Persian heartland at the time of Darius. His rise to the status of royal and imperial god apparently did not coincide, or at least not immediately, with widespread worship, again in analogy with such cases as that of Aššur."^[4] Albert de Jong, surveying the same evidence, presses the paradox to its point: "the kings claim to mimic the activities of their god, but... in reality their god increasingly came to be seen in the image of the earthly kings", Ahura Mazdā becoming, in effect, king of heaven.^[32]

The sharpest single text remains the so-called daiva inscription of Xerxes (XPh). Among the lands of his empire, Xerxes says, was one "where previously false gods were worshipped. Afterwards... I destroyed that sanctuary of the demons, and I made proclamation, 'The demons shall not be worshipped!' Where previously the demons were worshipped, there I worshipped Ahuramazda and Arta reverent(ly)" (trans. Kent).^[33] The inscription closes not in triumph but in exhortation:

The man who has respect for that law which Ahuramazda has established... he both becomes happy while living, and becomes blessed when dead.

Xerxes I, XPh §4d, trans. Kent^[33]

Every load-bearing word has been contested. The daivas: Kent's "demons" or "false gods" are Kuhrt's untranslated "daivas", and their identity, the old Iranian gods condemned in the Gāthās, foreign gods, or the gods of rebels, is exactly the question.^[33] The phrase rendered by Kent "and Arta reverent(ly)" (ṛtācā brazmaniy): Kuhrt translates "at the proper time and with the proper ceremony" and flags the uncertainty as large, while Skjærvø prints it as a marked Avestan citation inside the Old Persian, "You should sacrifice to Ahuramazdā (Avestan:) according to the Order up on high!", his strongest single case of the inscriptions quoting the liturgy.^[33][3]

The older hunt for a datable act of destruction has largely been given up. Boyce had already rejected the two favourite candidates on the evidence: Herodotus shows Xerxes ordering Athenian exiles to sacrifice "after their manner" on the burnt Acropolis, so "There was no question of the Persian king solemnizing the rites of Mazda-worship in that alien place", and the Esagila at Babylon "remained in ruins until the downfall of his dynasty" on the old view of its destruction; her own reading was internal Zoroastrian zeal, the suppression among Iranians of the worship of "those warlike beings condemned by the prophet".^[25] The Babylonian identification has since collapsed on independent grounds: it is now held that there was no destruction of Babylonian temples or cults by Xerxes at all.^[8] Kuhrt's own reading of the text's frame is deflationary: the disorder Xerxes describes gives "the impression... of a generalised restlessness threatening to disturb the imperial tranquillity, rather than the king reporting on a specific act of rebellion", the whole being formulaic royal ideology, Xerxes building on "Darius I's equation of loyalty to the Persian king with proper honouring of Auramazda", a "crystallisation of a stricter royal ideology".^[8] Henkelman's verdict for the current consensus is of a piece: the referent is "a political discourse in which Auramazdā became the patron of the imperial project" rather than a persecution edict.^[4]

The archive adds one detail that brings the inscription unexpectedly down to earth. In the Elamite version of XPh, Xerxes says he celebrated for Auramazdā the šip, and the šip is a known quantity in the Fortification texts: a grand feast of the gods, Elamite in descent, celebrated at sites of royal profile. The word of the proclamation and the practice of the ration lists here finally meet.^[31]

No image of Ahura Mazdā is identified from the early Achaemenid period, and the god's presence was marked, in one striking rite, by an emptiness: on Xerxes' march the Persian army was accompanied by "the sacred chariot of Zeus drawn by eight white horses; behind the horses followed the drivers on foot, holding the reins; for no mortal may mount that seat" (Herodotus 7.40, trans. Kuhrt), "Zeus" here being the Greek rendering of the Persian high god.^[34][8] Boyce read the rule broadly: in the iconography of Darius's reign "the prohibition was maintained against making a representation of any divine being", the tomb inscriptions containing "orthodox words of worship for Ahuramazda, and for him alone; but... no visual representation there of the supreme Being".^[5]

The famous figure in the winged ring that hovers above the king at Behistun, Persepolis and Naqsh-e Rostam, read for a century as Ahura Mazdā himself, is now the centre of an unresolved dispute. The form is borrowed: the winged disk "derives ultimately from Egypt, where it belonged to Horus", travelled the Near East "as a symbol of power and royalty", and reached Iran through Assyrian and Urartian versions in which a figure in the disk holds a bow; "in all known Iranian examples the figure in the winged circle holds the ring of divinity, instead of the bow of Assyrian and Urartian tradition".^[5] The old identification with the god is still defended (Root)^[35]; Boyce argued the figure cannot be the supreme God, being male where the fravaši was female and mirroring the king too closely, "in both gesture and apparel... the mirror-image of the king beneath", and read it instead as the royal khvarnah, the divine fortune that attaches to the legitimate king: "the figure in the circle is the royal khvarenah, which accompanies each ruler and attaches itself to a whole dynasty through the sacred power of royal blood".^[5] Gnoli granted the khvarnah reading's currency while insisting it is unproven, the glory being nowhere named in the inscriptions.^[36] The arguments behind the khvarnah case have since been itemised. Shahbazi gave five reasons for rejecting the figure as Ahura Mazdā, summarised by Silverman: the identification rested on "a circular argument", supported "by appeal to its symbolizing Aššur in Assyria" when the Assyrian identification had itself assumed the Persian one; further, "it contradicts the evidence of Herodotus that Ahuramazda was not depicted"; "it fails to account for the variety of the forms of the motif"; "it does not explain why the supreme god of a ruling nation is sometimes given a subordinate position in depictions"; and, lastly, "it ignores the dissimilarity to known depictions of Ahuramazda in later Iranian art".^[24] Boyce's mirror-image observation is in origin Shahbazi's: "the bust that appears in the disk always appears identical to the king depicted below it".^[24] Pierre Lecoq argued back on each point, Herodotus perhaps meaning only that no cult statue was made, without, in Silverman's judgement, establishing the positive identification; Abolala Soudavar split the difference, the plain disk as farnah and the disk-with-bust as Ahura Mazdā, resting on what Silverman calls "an unsubstantiated division between Ahuranic and Mithraic traditions".^[24] The seal evidence has pushed the question open rather than closed: Mark Garrison's survey of the Persepolis glyptic, with its "dazzling variety of divine and numinous figures", leads him to speak only of "the winged symbol", a caution that "forbids a straightforward reading as 'Auramazdā'", while Bruno Jacobs has proposed the figure is Auramazdā conceived as an ancestral or clan deity, which "could help to explain why the deity was, on the one hand, of relatively modest importance in terms of sacrifices and, on the other, chosen as royal god and emblem of the empire".^[9] The one safe statement is that the symbol marks the king's rule as divinely sanctioned (see the winged symbol).

Boyce found a second level of meaning in the tomb façade itself: the winged figure, the moon-disk with "the ancient Mesopotamian symbol of the moon-god Sin", and the fire "make a balanced group of three objects before which the king stands in reverence", so that "the tomb-relief simply shows the king at prayer according to orthodox Zoroastrian prescriptions".^[5] She read the six Persian nobles carved beside the king as mirroring "the grouping of the six Amesa Spentas around Ahuramazda", Darius drawing an analogy between his realm, won with six helpers, and the kingdom of heaven.^[5] The readings are elegant, argued, and unverifiable; they show how far the monuments can be made to speak either theology, which is precisely why the archive's plainer testimony now weighs so heavily.

Worship of Ahura Mazdā in the Achaemenid heartland used no cult images and, in the early period, no temples. The outsider's eye of Herodotus caught the profile in the empire's first generation: "The Persians have no images of the gods, no temples nor altars, and consider the use of them a sign of folly" (1.131, trans. Rawlinson); they climb the mountain tops to sacrifice to "Zeus", the name they give, Herodotus explains, to the whole circle of the sky.^[34] De Jong's analysis keeps what is sound and marks what is Greek: the equation is "undoubtedly an interpretatio graeca of Iranian Ahura Mazda", but "There is no reason to assume that the Persians called the entire vault of heaven Zeus", the cosmic identification being most likely "Herodotus' conclusion, based on the information that the Persians pray on a mountain top"; and if Herodotus inferred that the gods had no human form, "he was clearly mistaken", since Avestan text and Achaemenid art alike conceive the divinities anthropomorphically. The aniconism itself, though, is genuine, and his verdict on the chapter is measured: important "because of its great antiquity, not because of its great informative qualities", yet preserving real observations in "this earliest description of Zoroastrianism in Greek literature".^[7]

The material record agrees with the profile. Darius's inscriptions mention āyadanā, "places of worship", but no temple building of the early period has been identified in Persis; the sacred fire was elevated on open-air stone fire-holders, of which the earliest known examples stand at Pasargadae. Boyce judged them "the first known examples of many such objects used in Zoroastrian worship down the centuries", a stand for elevating fire rather than an altar, and took the Pasargadae installations, with the tomb of Cyrus, as testimony to orthopraxy at the first court.^[5] The ethic Herodotus reports beside the rites is the one the inscriptions carve: Persian boys taught "to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth", with lying "the most disgraceful thing in the world" (1.136, 138).^[34]

The royal cult's exclusive voice ended in the fourth century. Artaxerxes II (r. 405/4–359/8) broke with more than a century of usage in his building inscriptions at Susa:

By the will of Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithra I built this palace. May Ahuramazda, Anahita and Mithra protect me from all evil, and that which I have built may they not shatter nor harm.

Artaxerxes II, A²Sa, trans. Boyce^[5]

Boyce marks the rupture: "Down all the generations which Artaxerxes here names the Achaemenian kings had invoked in their inscriptions only Ahuramazda; and now he himself broke with this long-established tradition by calling also upon Mithra and Anahita."^[5] The same king, on Berossus' testimony, was the first to set up cult statues of Anaitis across the empire's capitals. The triad he named, Ahura Mazdā, Mithra, Anāhitā, would be prominent again in Sasanian worship; on Boyce's reading the royal patronage even reshaped the old Ahuric triad, Anāhitā "as a water-divinity" usurping Vouruna's ancient place beside Mithra.^[5]

To roughly the same era Boyce assigned the creation of the Zoroastrian devotional calendar, in which each of the thirty days of the month is named for a divinity. Ahura Mazdā received four of them: "This was to devote not one but four days in each month to Ahuramazda," each dedication "explicitly to him as Creator", a fourfold honour in which she detected, esoterically, the satisfaction of the Zurvanites, for whom the number would recall Zurvan's fourfold nature; outwardly "The Creator was only and always Ahuramazda, even to the Zurvanites."^[5] The Sīrōzah, the liturgy of the thirty days, bears the claim out at first hand: the month's first day is the god's own, "We sacrifice unto the bright and glorious Ahura Mazda", the Amesha-Spentas, "the all-ruling, the all-beneficent", beside him (Sīrōzah II.1), while the eighth, fifteenth and twenty-third days are each styled Dai, "Creator", told apart by the name of the day that follows, "Dai pa Adar. To the Maker Ahura Mazda, bright and glorious" (Sīrōzah I.8); Darmesteter's note sets exactly those three days, with the first, under the rule of the Creator.^[6] The calendar carried the god's supremacy into the daily devotional round of every later Zoroastrian community, whatever the currents at the late court.

The Greeks knew the Wise Lord by name from at least the fourth century BCE. The earliest occurrence is in the pseudo-Platonic Greater Alcibiades (122a), where the education of Persian princes includes "the Magic of Zoroaster, the son of Oromazes"; de Jong notes that the filiation is "wholly unconnected with Iranian ideas, for in Iran—contrary to Greece—divinities do not have mortal offspring", a first specimen of the Greek habit of keeping the god's name while re-plotting his relations.^[7] Aristotle's lost On Philosophy, as reported by Diogenes Laertius, already states the dualism with the standard double naming: according to the Magi "there are two principles, a good demon and an evil demon: the name of the first is Zeus and Oromasdes, and that of the other Hades and Areimanios".^[7]

The fullest ancient account of the god outside Iranian literature is Plutarch's (De Iside et Osiride 46–47): "Horomazes is born from the purest light and Areimanius from darkness, and they are at war with one another. The former created six gods... The other created an equal number as rivals to these." Then, on Theopompus' fourth-century authority, the ages of the world: three thousand years of alternating dominion, three thousand of war, until the destined end when "Hades shall perish and men shall be happy".^[7] De Jong's assessment of this text sets the standard for using the Greek evidence: it is bookish, yet it descends from "highly specialised priestly traditions", containing "the only known description of the Heptad in non-Iranian literature", and preserving doctrine "undoubtedly genuine" that the Iranian sources themselves later obscured; the famous clause making Mithras "the Mediator" between the two powers, by contrast, is in part Plutarch's own Platonising gloss.^[7] The Theopompan frame also anchors chronology: it puts a developed cosmic eschatology of Ahura Mazdā's final victory, with the resurrection, in circulation by the later Achaemenid period.^[7] De Jong's wider stratification of the witnesses, Herodotus and Agathias reflecting lay tradition, Strabo, Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius priestly tradition, explains the unevenness: the Greek image of the god, critically sifted, tells more about the lived religion than any contemporary source but the archive itself.^[7]

Were the Achaemenid kings, then, Zoroastrians? The question has organised the field for a century, and the honest answer is that the field has largely stopped asking it in that form. The positions are best given in their holders' own words.

The classic positions were staked out a century ago, and both anticipate the modern camps. A. V. W. Jackson's standard biography of the prophet accepted the tradition's own reckoning, the short chronology: "we have good reason, on the authority of the tradition, for making B.C. 660–583 as the era of Zoroaster."^[37] On that dating the prophet's royal patron stood close enough to the dynasty to invite conflation with Hystaspes the father of Darius; Jackson refused it: "There is no good ground, however, for identifying this ruler with Hystaspes, the father of Darius", an identification made by Ammianus Marcellinus but doubted "as early as Agathias", a doubt he judged "unquestionably well founded".^[37] James Hope Moulton's Hibbert Lectures then set the terms that governed half a century: "Darius is pronounced to have been the first true Zoroastrian" among the Achaemenian kings, "but it is urged that antiquity had dimmed the clearness of the Prophet's more esoteric teaching even with this truly religious monarch"; the earlier kings belong to "the unreformed Iranian religion", for "The cult of Ahura Mazdah is not a mark of Zarathushtra's teaching, having been hereditary in a small aristocratic caste long before his time. The popular religion of Persia, as described very accurately by Herodotus, is the proto-Aryan nature-worship."^[38] Against Eduard Meyer's dictum that "it cannot be doubted by any unprejudiced mind that Cyrus was a Zoroastrian", Moulton set L. H. Gray's finding that "there is no evidence whatever to show that he was a Zoroastrian".^[38]

The maximal case is Boyce's, stated in her History of Zoroastrianism and her Iranica articles.^[39][40] The Achaemenid royal house declared its allegiance in its names: around 600 BCE Arsames "called one of his sons by the name of Zoroaster's patron, Vistaspa... using its Avestan form", and Cyrus named his daughter Atossa, Greek for Hutaosā, that patron's queen; "This group of family names, taken together, thus provides evidence that members of both branches of the Achaemenian royal house had accepted Zoroastrianism by the early sixth century B.C., and wished to declare their allegiance to it publicly."^[5] The names argument itself is Moulton's, flagged in 1913 as his own find, the point, valeat quantum, being new:

One solitary scrap of evidence in favour of Cyrus's connexion with Zoroastrianism I am bound to present before I leave him... He called his daughter Atossa... This was the name of Vishtaspa's queen; and of course the name of Vishtaspa himself, Zarathushtra's royal patron, was perpetuated in the Achaemenian family, in Hystaspes the father of Darius. I do not think the double coincidence can be accidental.

Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, 1913^[38]

Boyce is its fullest elaborator rather than its author, and Jackson's old caution still frames it: the modern argument is from the currency of the names in the family, the identity of the two Vištāspas having been anciently asserted and anciently rejected.^[37] The fire-holders of Pasargadae, the exposure-compatible tomb forms, the exclusive naming of the god, and the ethical texture of DNb complete her case. West, no maximalist, still endorses its keystone: the religion of the Achaemenid kings from Darius on is "defined by the worship of Ahura Mazdā instead of the traditional Indo-Iranian deities", which sets "the latest possible date" for Zarathustra's activity, and the name Vištāspa in Arsames' family implies that family's Zoroastrianism already.^[12]

Skjærvø holds the continuity while dissolving the founder. He accepts the philological case that the Gathic poet performs the figure of Zarathustra rather than simply being him, yet argues that the inscriptions' "numerous Avestan echoes" and near-citations (the creation formula against Yasna 37.1; XPh's ṛtācā brazmaniy) show the royal religion to be the Avestan religion: "there are so many similarities between Achaemenid religion and Zoroastrianism defined in this manner that it is hard to conclude that the latter was not the religion of the Achaemenid kings, at least from Darius on"; the king, as supreme sacrificer, "like the Old Avestan sacrificer, becomes Zarathustra permanently".^[28][3]

Kellens states the sceptical pole. On the long chronology now generally accepted, Zarathustra (if he existed) stands centuries before Cyrus, so "the Achaemenid Zoroastrianism is necessarily a post-Zoroastrian Mazdaism, like that of the Young Avesta"; the term "Zoroastrian" lacks any rigorous definition to test against; and the question rests on three unexamined postulates, a radically innovating doctrine, an individual founder, an organised mission.^[41] Of the Gāthās he concludes: "the question of an author is meaningless. The Gāthās do not stand forth as the work of one man, but as the expression of an entire religious group."^[41] The inversion he proposes has become a touchstone: "we know the Achaemenid religion better than Zoroastrianism", the inscriptions being "the first direct testimony of Mazdaism", primary evidence in their own right rather than a defective copy of the Avesta.^[41] In the current Companion he adds the decisive category-point: "the Achaemenids could say 'Ahura Mazdā is a great god' or 'I made a sacrifice to Ahura Mazdā' but not 'I am a Mazdean' or 'I am a Zoroastrian'", because confessional affiliation did not exist as an ancient category; "we do not have reliable criteria for 'Zoroastrianism' at the time".^[42]

The archive has re-set the terms for everyone. Henkelman's methodological stricture is that the Zoroastrian thesis "is hardly a helpful diagnostic tool for an objective and fruitful study of the tablets, but rather an obstacle", and his verdict on the labels has the current consensus in it: "to style Achaemenid religion as Mazdaist (or even Mazdayasnist) is about as helpful as calling Babylonian religion Mardukist or Assyrian religion Aššurist".^[30][4] Lincoln reaches a similar deflation from the ideology itself: "the Zoroastrian texts and the Achaemenian inscriptions can be understood as two variants within a broad, pan-Iranian tradition that one might label 'Mazdaean'", variants that "inherited common linguistic, cultural, and religious features that they developed in their own fashions and for their own reasons"; whether any Achaemenid "was Zoroastrian in any meaningful sense" he finds of little interest, the question being "either unresolvable or simply a matter of semantics".^[21] De Jong, standing between the camps, observes that the frame "the Achaemenians were Zoroastrians" is in one sense "widely accepted", the real question being "what such a proposition implies for the writing of the history of that faith".^[7] The god himself is the one fixed point all parties share: a great Ahura Mazdā, exclusively named by the early kings, embedded in a plural working pantheon, whose worship the Gāthās, the inscriptions and the archive each light from a different side.

In later Zoroastrianism the Wise Lord becomes Ohrmazd, the wholly good creator at war with Ahriman across the ages of the world, moving toward a final renovation, the doctrine whose Achaemenid-era circulation Theopompus already attests.^[7] The Younger Avesta had already given his creatorship its contested, serial form: in the Vendidad's opening geography the god makes each of the sixteen good lands, "I have made every land dear to its dwellers, even though it had no charms whatever in it", and to each creation "Angra Mainyu, who is all death", replies with a counter-creation.^[43] The Bundahišn then opens the Pahlavi account with the two powers in their fixed places:

the region of light is the place of Auharmazd, which they call 'endless light'... Auharmazd and the region, religion, and time of Auharmazd were and are and ever will be; while Aharman in darkness, with backward understanding and desire for destruction, was in the abyss, and it is he who will not be; and the place of that destruction, and also of that darkness, is what they call the 'endlessly dark.'

Bundahišn I.2–3, trans. West^[16]

Between the two lay only the void, "empty space, that is, what they call 'air'", and both spirits are "limited and unlimited", the light and the dark each endless away from the boundary (I.4–5).^[16] The symmetry invited speculation: Zurvanism, the monist heterodoxy, made Ohrmazd and Ahriman twin sons of Zurvan, "Time", the reading of the Gathic twins whose fortunes are traced above (see "The two Spirits").^[14] After the Achaemenids the god who had had no image acquired one: worshipped with statues in Parthian Armenia as Aramazd, and carved in the Sasanian investiture reliefs as a crowned figure who hands the ring of rule to the king. The central figure is continuous from the prophet's hymns through the carved words of the kings to the living faith: the Wise Lord who made the good world and human happiness within it, and sustains both against the Lie.