Ahura Mazda

Ahura Mazda, the name means the Wise Lord, is the supreme God of Zoroastrianism: uncreated, all-knowing, and entirely good. He is the creator of the ordered cosmos and of everything beneficent within it: light, life, truth, the good mind. In the Gathas, the ancient hymns attributed to the prophet Zarathustra, Ahura Mazda is the one addressed and praised, the origin of asha, the truth and right order that runs through the world, and the only being truly worthy of worship.

What sets Zoroastrian theology apart is what it does with evil. Ahura Mazda is not its author; suffering, falsehood and disorder come from a separate hostile spirit opposed to him. The good God creates and upholds the world through the Amesha Spentas, the Bounteous Immortals who are his agents and aspects. Zoroastrianism is therefore centred on one good God, while explaining evil through the cosmic conflict rather than laying it at that God's door.

Article one presents Ahura Mazda chiefly through the Gathas' hymnic address to him as the good, all-knowing creator. The god's role in actual political life is attested independently, and considerably more concretely, in the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid Persian empire, which used his name and authority to legitimate imperial rule centuries before the Gathas were written down as a fixed text.

Darius I's Behistun inscription, carved on a cliff face in the late sixth century BCE to commemorate his suppression of rival claimants to the throne, repeatedly invokes Ahuramazda as the god who granted him kingship and favoured his cause, and it describes the rebels he defeated as followers of drauga, the Old Persian cognate of the Avestan druj that article one's neighbouring entries treat as asha's cosmic opposite. Whether Darius and his successors were Zoroastrians in the doctrinal sense the Gathas describe, or drew on an older shared Iranian religious vocabulary that Zoroastrianism itself also drew from, is a genuinely open question among historians of the Achaemenid period, since the inscriptions never mention Zarathustra by name.

The connection between Ahura Mazda and state power became explicit and undisputed centuries later under the Sasanian empire, which made Zoroastrianism its official religion from the third century CE. Kartir, an influential priest under several Sasanian kings, left his own rock inscriptions describing an organised priestly hierarchy enforcing orthodoxy and suppressing rival religions within the empire, evidence that the moral and cosmic order article one describes Ahura Mazda upholding had, by then, been institutionalised as an actual state religious apparatus with the power to define who counted as faithful.