Mithra- Persian GodDeity"Lord of Wide Pastures"

Lord of Covenants

Before Mithra, an oath was just words. Two men clasped hands, swore by the fire, and trusted each other to keep their word. Mithra made the oath sacred. In the Avesta, his name is also the common noun for "contract": the god and the bond he enforced were the same word, the same force. When two parties swore, Mithra was not invoked as witness. He was the oath, given form with ten thousand eyes and ten thousand ears, watching every corner of the world where a promise might be broken.

His name appears on a treaty tablet from the fourteenth century BCE, inscribed at Bogazköy between the Hittite king Suppiluliuma I and the Mitanni king Shattiwaza. Already then, Mithra guaranteed the sworn word. Zoroaster's reforms later named him yazata, a divine being in service to Ahura Mazda, but the Younger Avesta restored him to full hymnic glory, and the Mihr Yasht praises him with a grandeur rivaling Ahura Mazda's own.

The Mihr Yasht

The tenth Yasht portrays Mithra as "the lord of wide pastures," ruling the Iranian lands between mountains and seas. He never sleeps. His ten thousand eyes miss nothing; his ten thousand ears hear every whispered betrayal.

His chariot rides on a thousand golden pillars, drawn by white horses shod in gold and silver. His weapon is a silver-shafted mace with a hundred bosses and a hundred blades. He does not ride alone. Verethragna, yazata of victory, runs before him in the form of a sharp-tusked boar, clearing the path while Mithra raises the mace behind.

Wrath of the Oath-Keeper

What befell the oath-breaker fills verse after verse of the Mihr Yasht. Mithra descends on the faithless one's house. Cattle die. Armies scatter. No fortress and no host can shield the one who broke his word.

Kings invoked him before battle. An army that marched in violation of a treaty found Mithra arrayed against it. The Yasht is direct: he withdraws his support from the army that has broken faith and delivers it to its enemies. "Mithra, angry and offended, comes first along the road, then Rashnu, the well-grown, with the uplifted club." When oaths failed, the mace fell.

Before the Dawn

Each morning, before light touched the Iranian plateau, Mithra was already riding. The Mihr Yasht calls him "the first to rise over the Hara mountains ahead of the immortal, swift-horsed sun." His light preceded the sun's. What hid in darkness, he found first.

The Avesta kept Mithra and the sun distinct: Hvare-Khshaeta was the sun in the sky, Mithra the watching presence behind it. But for the farmer and the soldier, the sun that saw everything and the god who saw everything were one. By the Sasanian period, the distinction had nearly vanished.

Mehregan

The festival of Mehregan fell on the sixteenth day of the month of Mehr, and it ranked alongside Nowruz as ancient Iran's greatest celebration. Achaemenid and Sasanian kings feasted in purple robes and exchanged gifts. In the Shahnameh, Ferdowsi ties the date to the overthrow of the tyrant Zahhak by Fereydun, when the serpent-shouldered king's reign ended and the world returned to justice under Mithra's light.

Artaxerxes II broke centuries of precedent by inscribing Mithra's name alongside Ahura Mazda's at Susa. No Persian king before him had named another deity in a royal inscription.

Judge at the Bridge

After death, every soul crossed the Chinvat Bridge. Mithra waited there with Rashnu, who held the scales, and Sraosha, who escorted the dead. The three examined each soul: every oath kept or broken, every truth spoken or swallowed.

For the righteous, the bridge widened into a broad road leading to the House of Song. For the oath-breaker, it thinned to a razor's edge. The wicked fell.