Tishtrya

Summary

Tishtrya is the star Sirius in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scripture: the star that brings the rain, to whom the eighth of the hymns of praise called Yashts is addressed. The hymn calls him "the seed of the waters", white, shining and seen from afar, and says that Ahura Mazda set him as lord and overseer above all the stars, as he set Zarathustra above men. The Greek writer Plutarch reports from the Persians that Oromazes, Ahura Mazda, adorned the heavens with stars and set one star before all the others as guardian and watchman, the Dog-star, Sirius.

People and herds waited for his rising, saying: when shall we see him rise? When will the springs run with waves as thick as a horse's body? When he rose, he flew towards the sea Vourukasha as swiftly as the arrow that the archer Erekhsha shot from one mountain to another; Ahura Mazda, the waters and the plants helped him, and Mithra opened a wide road for him. Then for ten nights he appeared to people as a youth of fifteen, for ten as a bull with golden horns, and for ten as a white horse with golden ears, and in each shape he called out: who will offer me haoma and meat, so that I may give him sons, cattle and horses? Tishtar Yasht 8.5–7, 13–19.

Then he went down into the sea as a white horse, and the demon Apaosha came out to meet him as a black horse, black-eared, black-backed and black-tailed, branded with terror. They met hoof against hoof for three days and three nights, Apaosha overcame him, and Tishtrya fled a mile from the sea crying: woe is me, Ahura Mazda, people do not sacrifice to me by my own name as they do to others by theirs; had they done so, I would have taken the strength of ten horses, ten camels, ten bulls, ten mountains and ten rivers. So Ahura Mazda himself offered him a sacrifice by name and gave him that strength. He went down again, they fought until noon, and Tishtrya won and cried: hail to the waters, the plants and the land, the life of the waters will flow unchecked to the fields of large grain and the pastures of small grain. Then he made the sea boil from its shores to its middle and rose out of it; vapour rose over a mountain in the middle of the sea and became clouds driven by the wind, rain and sleet fell on the seven regions of the earth, and Apam Napat, "the Son of the Waters", divided the water among the lands.

The idea the story turns on is that the rain does not come from the star alone. The star rises on time, but it is beaten the first time because people have not sacrificed to it by name, and it wins only after the offering. The water is held in the sea, drought is a black horse standing before it, and the offering is part of the road by which water comes down to the fields. The figures tied to the story are those who help the rain and the one who stops it: Mithra who opens the road, haoma along whose paths the clouds travel, and Angra Mainyu, who flung the falling stars across the sky to stop the stars that carry the seed of the waters.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since neither Persian essay mentions him. Tištriia ends in an Avestan adjective suffix; remove it and tištr remains. Iranists take its first t as what is left of the numeral "three", so for them the name means "the one of the three stars". What remains is -štr, which is Arabic al-shiʿrā, the Arabs' own name for this star: š is sh, r is r, and t stands where Arabic has ʿ, the two answering each other between the tongues as in Arabic sabʿ and Latin septem, "seven". Lane records that al-shiʿrā is a bright star that rises in the intense heat, and that the Arabs said "we pastured on the shiʿrā herbage", meaning the grass that grew after the rising of Sirius. On this reading Tishtrya is al-shiʿrā, the star whose rising people wait for so that water and pasture follow, which is what the hymn makes him: a star at whose rising people ask when the springs will run.

Linguistic Root

Attested forms

Following Forssman, Iranists analyse Tištriia as an Indo-Iranian form meaning "the one who belongs to the three stars", the three stars of Orion's Belt that line up towards Sirius. In the Veda these three stars are seen as an arrow shot by Tiṣya or Rudra; in Iran Tishtrya himself flies like the arrow. The Sumerian name of Sirius was KAK.SI.SÁ, "arrow", and the Akkadian šukūdu, also "arrow".

Al-shiʿrā

Lane: "al-shiʿrā, a certain bright star, the star that rises after Gemini in the time of intense heat", and "when Sirius rises, the owner of the palm-trees begins to see" what their fruit will be. There are two of this name: al-shiʿrā al-ʿabūr, which crossed the Milky Way and was worshipped by some of the Arabs, whence the Qur'anic "and that He is the Lord of Sirius", and al-shiʿrā al-ghumayṣāʾ, Procyon, which the Arabs said wept for her sister until her eye was bleared.

The comparison removes the Avestan suffix and leaves the first t to the numeral, so only š, t and r remain, answered in Arabic by sh, ʿ and r. The ʿ often drops between the tongues, and it can be answered by t, as in sabʿ beside sept-. The Avestan š here was once s, which became š after i as it does in Iranian, and s and sh fall in one group in the Juthoor laws.

ʿAthtar

There is a second echo in -štr. The same element is the star word in the Indo-European analysis, and the Ishtar page reads the Babylonian goddess's name Ištar as ʿAthtar, the Venus star of the South Arabians, once the ʿ has dropped and th has turned to sh, so that its letters meet the -štr of Tishtrya letter for letter. Both are names of stars, and al-shiʿrā remains the nearer reading because it is the name of this very star.

Apaosha

Forssman divides the adversary's name Apaoša into a negative prefix and pauša, "the unthriving one", matched by Indic póṣa, "thriving". A Middle Persian book gives it the folk explanation "destruction of water". On the method we read the second part as Arabic fashā: in Lane the cattle fashat when they spread over their pastures, a man afshā when his cattle became numerous, and al-fashāʾ is the multiplying and numerousness of cattle; Arabic f answers p. On this reading Apaosha is the drought in which the herds do not multiply, which is what the people waiting for Sirius fear.

Key Mythic Narratives

The first rain in the Bundahishn

The Bundahishn, "the primal creation", tells the story another way. When Ahriman attacked creation, the second battle was with the water. Tishtar appeared in three shapes, man, horse and bull, and rained ten days and nights in each, every drop as big as a bowl, until water stood a man's height over the whole earth; the noxious creatures Ahriman had made were killed and went into the holes of the earth. Then the wind swept the water to the edges of the earth, and the wide ocean came from it. The poison of those creatures remained in the soil, so Tishtar went down into the sea as a white horse to carry it away; Apaosh met him as a black horse and Tishtar fled, then asked Ohrmazd for victory and was given the strength of ten horses and ten camels, and Apaosh fled. Tishtar then took up the water with a cloud for a jar and rained drops like bulls' heads and men's heads; two demons fought against the rain, and the fire Vazisht, the fire in the cloud, turned its club on them. The poison mixed with the water, and the sea became salt.

The Bundahishn also says that the plants withered under Ahriman's attack; Amurdad pounded them and mixed them with the water Tishtar had seized, Tishtar rained it on the earth, and plants grew like hair on a head. In the sea stands a tree bearing the seeds of all plants; every year a bird strips it and mixes its seeds in the water, and Tishtar takes them up with the rain and rains them on all the regions. The Mēnōg ī Xrad names the bird that nests on this tree the Sēnmurw, the Simurgh. Bundahishn 9.2–3 and 27.3; Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Simorḡ".

The falling stars

The hymn names another enemy of Tishtrya: the witches called pairikā, who fly between earth and sky as "worm stars", flung by Angra Mainyu to stop the stars that carry the seed of the waters. Tishtrya drives them from the sea, and then the wind drives the clouds. Panaino takes them to be meteors.

Symbolic Reading

The Persian essay reads Angra Mainyu as what destroys the crops: drought, pests and disease. In Tishtrya's story that drought stands as a black horse before the water, and the noxious creatures die under the rain of the Bundahishn.

Sirius rises at dawn in July, while the rains of Iran come in autumn. Panaino suggests that Tishtrya's first defeat accounts for this gap: the month named after the star does not coincide with the rain, so the hymn tells that the star is beaten first and wins after the offering, while people wait between rising and rain. The image of the arrow carries the speed people hope for from the clouds once the star has risen.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Iranists compare Tishtrya's freeing of the waters with Indra's killing of the serpent Vṛtra in the Veda: the serpent holds the waters back in the mountain, and Indra kills it after drinking Soma, so that the seven rivers run. In both stories the fighter needs the sacred drink for strength, but Tishtrya is beaten first and wins after Ahura Mazda's sacrifice, while Indra wins at the first blow. Both belong to the gods' fight with sea and dragon and to the storm and the power over water, and the comparison storm gods across twelve cultures sets them side by side.

At Ugarit Mot swallows Baal and the rain is gone, then Baal returns and the water with him. The two stories share a rain-giver who is beaten and comes back, and part in that Baal's enemy is death, Tishtrya's drought.

The Egyptians called Sirius Sothis, and Plutarch says it was the special star of Isis. The rain of the Bundahishn, covering the earth a man's height to kill Ahriman's creatures, is a witness of the flood, though here the water cleans the earth instead of punishing people.