Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/63



Ahura Mazda is the name Zarathushtra gives to God. The Iranians, as we shall see later, had brought to their new homeland several gods of the Indo-Iranian pantheon. Zarathushtra does not mention them by name in his hymns. This omission is not accidental; it is deliberate. His is altogether a new religion. No wonder he tells his hearers that he speaks to them words that are unheard of before. All thinking and doing, whether human or divine, is done through the mind. It is knowledge or wisdom which creates, moulds, and guides anything and everything. He, therefore, clothes the idea of godhead with wisdom and names him 'Ahura Mazda.' This collocation means literally, 'The Lord Wisdom' or 'The Wise Lord.' The first element of this compound, Ahura, 'Lord,' is one of the Indo-Iranian generic forms of godhead and Zarathushtra confers upon it the Iranian epithet Mazda, 'Wise.' The Aryan and Semitic gods that preceded Ahura Mazda were nature-gods Some of them later rose to a higher spiritual level and acquired spiritual epithets. Ahura Mazda was never a nature-god. He was what he ever is, the highly spiritual being. Apart from its use in the Gathas, the term Mazda is found in its derivative form Mazdaka, used as a Median proper name in 715 in the Assyrian inscriptions of Sargon. Moreover, the compound Ahura Mazda itself is found in its Assyrian equivalent Assara Mazas in an inscription of Assurbanipal. Though the inscription bears the date of the reign of king Assurbanipal, it records the use of this Assyrian form of Ahura Mazda in the latter part of the second millennium.

Zarathushtra uses the divine name variously as the metrical composition of the hymns requires. He employs the combinations Ahura Mazda and Mazda Ahura or the forms Ahura or Mazda respectively, designating God in all cases. In many instances the