Aka Manah (also Akem Manah, Akoman, Akvan)

The worst of them does not arrive with horns or fire. He arrives as a thought that was not there a moment before, settling behind the eyes like cold water finding a crack. A man who was content begins to tally the failings of his neighbors. A woman certain of her path feels the certainty thin out and curdle into a low static of doubt. Nothing has touched them. That is the point. Aka Manah works in the narrow space between intention and act, and his whole craft is to make a person take the worse of two roads while believing the choice was entirely their own.

In the oldest Zoroastrian hymns, the Gathas attributed to Zarathustra himself, he is barely a person at all. There the words akem manah mean simply “evil mind,” or the mind made evil, a condition rather than a creature. The deceitful man, one verse says, lives by actions that stem from evil mind. In another, Zarathustra promises to turn disobedience and evil mind away from Ahura Mazda through worship. The phrase names a state of the soul, the inward tilt toward the wrong thing. Yet even in those early lines the term starts to harden into something that can be pointed at, for the daevas, the old gods Zarathustra rejected, are called the offspring of evil mind. Give a quality enough weight and it grows a will. By the Younger Avesta the abstraction has acquired a shape of sorts and a side in the war.

That war is the architecture of the whole religion. On one side stands Ahura Mazda with his six radiant Amesha Spentas, the Bounteous Immortals, each an aspect of the good. Second among them is Vohu Manah, Good Mind or Good Purpose, the faculty by which a person recognizes truth and acts on it. For every one of these the dark spirit Angra Mainyu fashioned an opposite, and the opposite of Good Mind is Aka Manah. The pairing is exact, and it is the key to him. He is not chaos, not appetite, not rage. He is the corruption of judgment itself, the demon who gets between a person and their power to tell good from evil.

In Yasht 19 he is hurled into the struggle for the khvarenah, the divine glory, fighting beside Aeshma the demon of wrath and the dragon Azi Dahaka against Vohu Manah, Asha Vahishta, and the sacred fire Atar. The same hymn looks ahead to the end of the world and promises that when the final renovation comes, Aka Manah will be beaten by Vohu Manah, the good mind outlasting the bad. His most famous hour, though, comes in the temptation of the prophet. As Zarathustra stands against Angra Mainyu, Aka Manah comes at him with ninety-nine cruel and twisting questions, each built to snag his conviction and pick apart his faith in Ahura Mazda. It is a riddle-duel with a soul as the prize, a near cousin to the contest of Oedipus and the Sphinx. Zarathustra does not break. The interrogation fails, and the demon of the warped mind cannot warp the one mind made to resist him.

The Pahlavi books of the ninth to twelfth centuries give him rank and biography. In the Bundahishn he is the second creature Ahriman makes, called up out of darkness immediately after Mitokht, the demon of falsehood, and set there precisely to answer Ahura Mazda’s making of the world and to mirror Vohu Manah’s second place among the Immortals. He keeps company with Varan, concupiscence, alongside whom he was created, and his special collaborator is Anashtih, “non-peace.” The Denkard catalogues his work in close detail. He blunts the power to make righteous decisions. He plants the urge to hunt for gross defects in other people while a man hides his own. He sows discord, and out of that discord the physical evils of the world. By one strange reckoning he is even the reason newborns cry, frightening them in the cradle with images of the world’s fiery end. Among all the demons, the texts say, he is the one to be dreaded most.

One Pahlavi account, the Epistles of Zadspram, sends him against Zarathustra before the prophet is even born, and shows exactly how he is undone. Vohu Manah, having chased Akoman to the house, slyly turned back and invited the demon to step inside. Akoman, seeing his rival apparently leaving, decided his own task must already be finished, and so he too departed without accomplishing a single thing. He had been beaten by the very deceit he deals in. Sorrow is his sign, the books add, as joy is the sign of Vohu Manah, and it is sorrow he leaves behind him, the dull ache of a mind turned against itself.

For most of his history he has no shape, because a corrupted intention has no anatomy to draw. He is known by his effects, by the cast of a face gone bitter, not by any body. Only when he crosses into the New Persian epic does he take on flesh. In Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh he becomes Akvan, a div with long streaming hair, blue eyes, and a head like an elephant’s, the mouth crowded with tusks where teeth should be. In that tale he finds the hero Rostam asleep, lifts him high into the sky, and offers a choice: to be flung onto a mountain or into the sea. Rostam, knowing the demon’s mind runs backward and contrary, asks to be cast upon the mountain. Akvan, true to his nature, throws him into the water instead, and the hero swims clear, recovers his horse, and comes back to take the demon’s head. A passing reference to a “Stone of Akvan” hints at older stories around him that did not survive.

His powers are quiet and, within their narrow domain, total. He cannot lift a sword or breathe fire as a body would; what he does is older and far harder to guard against. He slips into the mind and fogs its compass, so that a person loses the ability to weigh right against wrong and chooses wrongly while feeling fully justified. He breeds doubt, suspicion, and the small cruelties that grow from them, and through them the larger harms of the world. Against the strong he brings ninety-nine questions. Against the ordinary he needs only one sour thought.

His weakness is built into what he is. A negation has nothing of its own to stand on, and he is conquered every time he meets the good mind clear-eyed and unafraid, whether in the prophet who would not answer him or in the hero who read his contrary nature and used it against him. He can be turned by his own trick, talked past his purpose, simply outlasted. And the cosmology promises his final defeat, vanquished at the renovation of the world along with every other daeva, when good purpose at last clears the evil one out of the human mind for good.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Aka Manah?

Aka Manah is the Zoroastrian daeva, or demon, of “evil mind,” “evil purpose,” and “evil intention.” He is a chief auxiliary of Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirit, and serves as the exact demonic opposite of Vohu Manah, the “Good Mind” who is second among the Amesha Spentas. He is also known as Akem Manah in Avestan, Akoman in Middle Persian, and Akvan in New Persian.

What does Aka Manah do to humans?

Aka Manah corrupts human judgment, blunting a person’s ability to tell good from evil so they make wrong choices while believing they are justified. According to the Pahlavi Denkard, he plants the impulse to seek out faults in others while hiding one’s own, sows discord, and brings misery. The Zoroastrian texts call him the demon most to be dreaded.

Who is the opponent of Aka Manah?

The eternal opponent of Aka Manah is Vohu Manah, the “Good Mind” or “Good Purpose,” one of the Amesha Spentas created by Ahura Mazda. Their opposition is structural in Zoroastrianism: Aka Manah is the corruption of judgment, while Vohu Manah is the faculty that recognizes truth. At the final renovation of the world, Aka Manah is prophesied to be vanquished by Vohu Manah.

How did Zoroaster resist Aka Manah?

When Angra Mainyu sent Aka Manah to tempt the prophet Zoroaster, the demon posed ninety-nine cruel and difficult questions designed to weaken his faith in Ahura Mazda, but Zoroaster refused to be overcome. In another Pahlavi account, the Epistles of Zadspram, Vohu Manah outwitted Akoman by pretending to leave, leading the demon to believe his work was done so that he departed without harming the prophet.

Is Aka Manah the same as Akvan in the Shahnameh?

Yes. Akvan is the New Persian form of Aka Manah, appearing as a div, or demon, in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. He is described with long hair, blue eyes, and an elephant-like head full of tusks. In his most famous tale he lifts the sleeping hero Rostam into the sky and, because of his contrary nature, throws him into the sea after Rostam cleverly asks to be thrown onto a mountain.

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Angra Mainyu, Vohu Manah, Ahura Mazda, Amesha Spenta, Ahura, Daeva, Mithra, Anahita, Div, Zahhak, Rostam, Simurgh, Aramazd, Anahit, Daitya, Shaitan