Uzerin Gah

Each Zoroastrian watch honours a region of the good creation, and the afternoon belongs to water. The Uzerin Gah invokes Apam Napat, the child or scion of the waters, one of the most ancient and enigmatic figures in the Indo-Iranian inheritance: a lofty lord of the liquid element who appears already in the Rig Veda under the same name, which makes him older than the split between the Indian and Iranian religions and one of the deepest continuities either tradition preserves. In Zoroastrian devotion the practical face of the watch was the waterside.

The tradition's piety toward water is famous, no pollutant may touch it, and the afternoon was the customary hour for bringing offerings to rivers and springs, for the ab-zohr, the libation to the waters that completes the Yasna, and for the personal prayers of women and men at wells and streams, usages Mary Boyce documented still alive in the Zoroastrian villages of Iran in the twentieth century. The watch's position in the day carries its own quiet symbolism: as the sun declines from Rapithwin's ideal noon, the liturgy turns from fire, the element of the zenith, to water, the element that receives and refreshes, so that the day's devotional arc moves through the two great ritual elements of the religion in their natural order. The believer's obligation remains the simple one common to all the gahs, the kusti rite and the watch's Avestan prayer, but the afternoon's texts face the flowing world.

The figure the afternoon watch salutes is a case study in how liturgy preserves what theology forgets. Apam Napat, grandson or child of the waters, was a great god of the common Indo-Iranian past: the Rig Veda hymns him as a golden radiance dwelling in the waters, and some scholars have seen in him an ancient deity of the fire born in water, lightning or the gleam on a river, whose paradoxical nature fascinated the early poets.

In the developed Zoroastrian system, where Ahura Mazda's supremacy reorganised the pantheon into created yazatas, Apam Napat kept an unusual title, ahura, lord, shared with only the greatest beings, a fossil of former rank; the tradition's texts give him the epithet of the swift-horsed and credit him with holding the royal fortune, the khvarenah, safe in the depths of the sea when it fled from usurpers, one of the great images of Iranian myth. Yet he has no cult feast of his own and little narrative; what he has, permanently, is the afternoon. Five times a millennium of days, whoever prays the Uzerin Gah names him, and the naming has outlasted empires, migrations and the loss of almost everything else once believed about him. Historians of religion cite exactly this case when they argue that ritual is the most conservative stratum of a tradition: doctrines about Apam Napat withered, but the watch that greets him has not missed an afternoon in something like three thousand years.