Obedience, the Guardian of the Night and of the Soul

Sraosha, whose name means Obedience or Hearkening, the attentive discipline of listening to the divine word, is a Zoroastrian yazata who personifies right religious attentiveness and guards the world against the assaults of the demons (daevas), especially in the vulnerable hours of night when their power is greatest. He is said to have been the first to recite the sacred liturgy and to spread the baresman (barsom) twigs used in worship, and he strikes down Aeshma, the demon of Wrath and violence, a pairing of Obedience against Fury that neatly states the tradition's moral psychology.

Sraosha's most tender role concerns the dead: he protects the soul of the righteous during the perilous three nights after death, before it is judged and led across the Chinvat Bridge, the sifting bridge that the good cross safely and the wicked fall from. In later texts he is one of the three judges of the soul.