Yazata, Thirty Names for Thirty Days

A yazata is defined by function rather than by rank: the word simply means worthy of worship, and it covers everything from the great figures with their own dedicated Yashts, hymns of real length and independent liturgical life, down to abstractions personified just enough to receive a name and a day. Mithra, invoked as guardian of covenant, contract and the truth of a spoken oath, and watcher of the wide pastures beneath the rising sun, has one of the longest and most developed of the Yashts, and his cult was influential enough to travel far beyond Zoroastrianism itself into the Roman world's separate Mithraic mystery religion centuries later. Anahita, goddess of the waters and closely tied to fertility and to kingship, received a similarly substantial hymn and an important temple cult under the Achaemenid and Sasanian empires. Sraosha, whose name is usually rendered obedience, has a narrower but structurally central role, guarding the soul on the journey after death and standing as the yazata most directly opposed to the chaos the daevas represent. What ties this whole class together beyond theology is the Zoroastrian calendar itself: each of the thirty days of the traditional month carries the name of a yazata, so that reciting the calendar is, in effect, reciting a roster of the class in fixed order, with religious observance and the passage of time bound together in a single naming system. This calendrical role has no real equivalent among the daevas, who are condemned rather than commemorated, and it is one of the clearest ways the Avesta's two opposed classes remain structurally parallel, one honored by a name for every day, the other named only to be refused.