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The Bounteous Immortals

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The Bounteous Immortals

Below Ahura Mazda, and in a sense expressions of him, stand the Amesha Spentas, the Bounteous or Holy Immortals. The six most often named are Vohu Manah, the Good Mind; Asha Vahishta, Best Truth; Khshathra Vairya, Desirable Dominion; Spenta Armaiti, Holy Devotion; Haurvatat, Wholeness; and Ameretat, Immortality. Counted together with Ahura Mazda or with his Bounteous Spirit they form a sacred seven.

What makes them distinctive is that they work on three levels at once. They are divine beings through whom the Wise Lord fashioned and now maintains the world. They are also moral qualities, a good mind, truth, right power, devotion, health, deathlessness, that the faithful are summoned to realize in themselves, so that ethics is participation in the divine. And each guards a domain of creation: Spenta Armaiti the earth, Haurvatat the waters, Ameretat the plants, and so on. Through them Zoroastrian thought binds its picture of the cosmos, its ethics and its worship into one order.

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