Amesha Spentas

Summary

The Amesha Spentas, Avestan Aməša Spənta, "the beneficent immortals", are the six whom Ahura Mazda brought into being first to help him against evil; with him they make seven. Their names are Good Thought, Best Truth, Desirable Dominion, Beneficent Devotion, Wholeness and Immortality. The Encyclopaedia Iranica says the expression itself does not occur in Zarathustra's hymns, though the names of all six occur there repeatedly and the seven are brought together in Yasna 47.1, and that its first occurrence is in the hymn of the Seven Chapters: "we worship the good beings, male and female, the beneficent immortals, ever-living, ever-benefiting". Zarathustra calls them Ahura Mazda's children: for him Ahura Mazda is the father of Good Thought, of Truth and of Devotion.

Their story is told in the Bundahishn, the Middle Persian book of creation. While Ahriman lay stunned for three thousand years, Ohrmazd first brought forth Good Thought, by whom his creatures advanced, while the evil spirit first brought forth Falsehood and then Evil Thought. Then arose Best Truth, then Desirable Dominion, then Beneficent Devotion, then Wholeness, then Immortality. From Ahriman's dark world came six to face them, Evil Thought, Andar, Savar, Nakahed, Tairev and Zairich, who are daevas. Each of the seven guards a creation: Ohrmazd the righteous man, Good Thought cattle, Best Truth fire, Desirable Dominion metals, Devotion the earth, Wholeness water, Immortality plants. The Zamyad Yasht says they are seven "of one thought, one speech, one deed, whose father and commander is one, the Maker Ahura Mazda"; each sees the other's soul; they are the makers, governors, keepers and preservers of these creations, and they will restore the world at the end of time. On that day each seizes his own adversary: Good Thought Evil Thought, Best Truth Andar, Desirable Dominion Savar, Devotion Nakahed, Wholeness and Immortality Tairev and Zairich, and Wholeness and Immortality smite hunger and thirst.

The idea the story turns on is that every part of the world has a guardian who is at the same time a quality a person can carry. The earth is devotion, water is wholeness, plants are immortality, fire is truth. Whoever keeps water clean shares the work of Wholeness, and whoever lies harms the fire. In the rite all seven are present in things: the earth of the sacred precinct for Devotion, the water of the libation for Wholeness, the plants for Immortality, the milk or meat for Good Thought, the metal vessels for Desirable Dominion, the fire for Best Truth, and the officiating priest for the Beneficent Spirit. The Encyclopaedia Iranica says every Zoroastrian should strive through worship, meditation and action to bring the seven into his own being.

The Greeks knew this scheme centuries before the Bundahishn was written down. Plutarch reports from Theopompus, a historian of the fourth century BCE, that Oromazes created six gods, the first of Good Thought, the second of Truth, the third of Order, and then one of Wisdom, one of Wealth and one of Pleasure in what is honourable, and that Areimanius created rivals equal to them in number. And two of the names entered Arabic: Wholeness and Immortality became Middle Persian Hordād and Amurdād, and the orientalist Lagarde saw that they are Hārūt and Mārūt, the two angels to whom magic was sent down in Babylon in the Sura of the Cow.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The Persian essay reads the six and the Beneficent Spirit as attributes of Ahura Mazda and sets each against one of the Most Beautiful Names of God: Good Thought against al-Ḥakīm, the Wise; Best Truth against al-ʿAdl and al-Ḥaqq; Desirable Dominion against al-Malik, the King; Wholeness against al-Kāmil; Immortality against al-Bāqī, the Everlasting; the Beneficent Spirit against al-Khāliq and al-Bāriʾ, the Creator; it leaves Devotion unmatched, and says that six of seven correspond, beyond chance. These are correspondences of meaning; the letters of the Avestan names and of the Arabic names do not meet. The letters meet elsewhere. Aməša is a negation and then -məša, whose š stands for r and t, as Old Persian arta, truth, is Avestan aša; so it is amərəta, "not dying", and after the negation its letters are those of mərət-, dead. These are the letters of Arabic mart, which Lane gives as a land without water or herbage, and from which the lexicographers derived the name Mārūt. On this reading, proposed on the method, Immortality is "the negation of mart", and its guardian is the guardian of plants. The detail of every correspondence is under Linguistic Root.

Linguistic Root

The names and the essay's correspondences

Correspondences of meaning

The essay calls four of its matches "complete" and two "semantic". Weighed by letters, none of them meets: Good Thought is Avestan vohu manah, with no letter of ḥakīm; Truth is aša, Old Persian arta, with no letter of ʿadl or ḥaqq; Desirable Dominion is xšaθra, with no letter of malik; Wholeness is haurvatāt and Immortality amərətāt, with no letter of kāmil or bāqī. The match of meaning is sound: wisdom, truth, kingship, wholeness and permanence are qualities of the Creator in both religions, and Theopompus shows that the Greeks knew the six as abstract goods in the fourth century BCE. That the Avestan names are the Arabic names, the letters do not show.

Hārūt and Mārūt

Two of the names did enter Arabic, though not where the essay placed them. The Encyclopaedia Iranica says Muslim philologists recognised that Hārūt and Mārūt were not Arabic, and that Lagarde discovered they were Haurvatāt and Amərətāt, Wholeness and Immortality, the guardians of water and plants. Middle Persian has Hordād and Amurdād; a Manichaean glossary pairs the Pahlavi forms with Sogdian hrwwt mrwwt; in Armenian the two names together became the name of a flower of the hyacinth family used in rites on Ascension Day. The loss of the initial a- of Mārūt is early and has parallels. The Islamic story says the two angels came down to earth and were tempted by a woman who became the planet Venus, and Lagarde saw in that Venus Anāhīd, the Iranian Anahita. So the names of the guardians of water and plants reached the Qur'an as the names of two angels in Babylon.

Immortality and mart

Lane, under m-r-t: Mārūt is the name of an angel, a foreign word, or from murūta; mart is a waterless desert without herbage, or land that grows nothing even when rained on, and Lane notes from the Tāj al-ʿarūs that land rained on in winter is not called mart, because the rain gives hope of herbage; mart is also a man with no hair on his eyebrows. Avestan amərətāt is a negation, then mərəta, dead, then the abstract suffix, so that after the negation the letters are m, r and t, the letters of mart in their order. Amurdād is the guardian of plants and mart is land without plants, so that the guardian's name is, on this reading proposed on the method, "the negation of mart": what keeps the land from becoming mart. The Iranica article "Amurdād" says that after Ahriman withered the first Plant, Amurdād pounded it to pieces and mixed it with the water that Tishtrya took and rained over the earth, and plants grew over all the earth. The reading stays proposed, because Avestan mərəta means dead, like Sanskrit mṛta, and Arabic mart is dead land, not a dead person.

Thought, earth, truth and the preservers

On the same method we read four more names, all proposed:

• manah, thought, with mainyu, spirit, from the same verb of thinking: m and n are the letters of manā, and Lane's umniyya is originally "a thing that a man meditates in his mind", later a lie, a wish and something recited. Good Thought is then "the good umniyya", what a person shapes in himself before he speaks or acts. Lane, m-n-y.
• ārmaiti, devotion, who is the earth: the glottal stop, r and m are the letters of arūma, in Lane the root-stock of a tree from which the roots branch, and the origin of a man; from the same root, "the earth aramat the dead body", consumed it. In Yasna 30 Devotion gives the spirits their bodies, and in the Bundahishn the bone is asked back from the spirit of earth at the resurrection. The remaining mati, thought, has no match. Lane, ʾ-r-m, Yasna 30.7, Mills's translation, p. 32, Bundahishn 30.6.
• aša, truth and order, Old Persian arta: r and t are the letters of rataba and rattala; in Lane rataba is to be fixed, firm, settled, and rattala al-kalām to put speech together and arrange it well. The b and l stand outside the name. Lane, r-t-b, r-t-l.
• spənta, beneficent: its sp comes in Avestan from an older ś and w, as aspa, horse, answers Sanskrit aśva, so the letters are ś or s, w and n, those of ṣāna: ṣānahu, he preserved it, kept it in its place. The Zamyad Yasht calls them "the keepers and preservers of these creations". But Bartholomae renders spənta "holy" and sets it beside Lithuanian šventas, and Arabic ṣ does not regularly answer Iranian s. Lane, ṣ-w-n, Bartholomae, Altiranisches Wörterbuch, cols. 1619–1620.

In its chapter on Persian words, the same essay reads šahr, city, from Akkadian šarru, king, saying "the city is the place of the king". The Pahlavi name of Desirable Dominion is Šahrewar, and its šahr is Avestan xšaθra itself, with θr changed as in Mithra becoming Mihr. So the essay brings together, without meaning to, the name of the third guardian and the Akkadian word for king, in the later Persian form, not the Avestan.

Key Mythic Narratives

Fire, the most active of the immortals

The expression is also used of every beneficent being, not only the six. In Yasna 1.2 Atar, the fire, is hailed as "the most active of the beneficent immortals", and in the Zoroastrian creed the believer says: I profess myself a Mazda-worshipper, a Zoroastrian, rejecting the daevas, one who praises and worships the beneficent immortals. In the Zoroastrian calendar the first seven days of each month belong to the seven, each has a month, and the seven feasts of obligation are theirs and their seven creations'. Steingass's Persian dictionary gives isfandārmuẕ as the name of the twelfth month of the solar year, of the fifth day of every month, of the angel who presides over that month, and the earth.

Desirable Dominion and the metal sky

The Gathas give Desirable Dominion no creation to guard; the later books make him guardian of metals, and make the sky, the first creation, guardianless. The Encyclopaedia Iranica says Zaehner resolved this: Avestan and Pahlavi texts make the sky of metal, so the lord of metals is lord of the sky; and since in the Gathas Zarathustra calls the sky "of hardest stone", the priests defined crystal as both stone and metal. For the believer, metals then became things to care for: weapons to defend the right, coins to give to the needy, vessels to keep burnished.

Wholeness, Immortality and silence at meals

The texts pair Wholeness and Immortality in the Gathas and after: "grant me, you who fashioned the cow, the waters and the plants, immortality and wholeness", Zarathustra says in Yasna 51.7. Because they guard water and plants they were tied to food and drink, so a Zoroastrian ate in silence out of respect for them, and Arda Viraf in his vision saw a man punished in hell for consuming water and plants while chattering. In the story of Zarathustra's birth his bodily substance was entrusted to Hordad and Amurdad, who brought rain on the grass; six white heifers grazed it, and his mother drank their milk.

Symbolic Reading

The Persian essay places the Amesha Spentas in its table of concepts it sees passing from Zoroastrianism into the Semitic religions, setting them against the angels of Hebrew and Islam, and it reads the conflict between Ahura Mazda and his adversary as truth and order against lie and chaos. The story of Hārūt and Mārūt bears out half of this reading: two names of the seven did pass into a story of two angels in the Qur'an and its commentaries, but they passed as fallen angels who teach magic, not as attributes of God.

The Encyclopaedia Iranica, following Lommel, says the scheme is an ancient way of looking at the world in which abstract and concrete were one being, the abstract the inner reality of the concrete, so that Devotion and the earth are the spiritual and material aspects of one thing. In the nineteenth century the orientalist Haug made them mere abstractions, Parsi reformers in Bombay took up his view to answer the charge of polytheism, and the encyclopaedia calls the interpretation anachronistic for Zarathustra's time.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Encyclopaedia Iranica says the ancestors of the Indians and Iranians worshipped "All the Immortals", Vedic viśve amṛtāḥ, the daevas among them, and that when Zarathustra rejected the daevas he kept worship for the beneficent ones alone. Dumézil saw in Wholeness and Immortality the Indian twins the Nāsatyas, the healer Aśvins, and many scholars opposed him; the six have also been compared with the Ādityas, sons of Aditi, a comparison the article "Hordād" calls possible but problematic. Wholeness and Immortality meet the Aśvins in being a pair never named apart, and in granting soundness of body and long life.

Ahura Mazda and the six sit together as seven "of one thought, one speech, one deed", each seeing the other's soul, against the daevas, who deliberate and choose the evil thought: one form of the divine council. And it is they who restore the world at the end of time, as told in Frashokereti. Zamyad Yasht 19.16–19.