Anahit (also Anahid; Greek Anaïtis)

The gold was still warm from the temple lamps when the soldiers set to work on it with their blades. They were Mark Antony’s men, a long way from Rome and unimpressed by a foreign goddess, and the statue of Anahit at Eriza was solid metal from crown to heel, the single richest object in Armenia. They cut her into portable pieces and carried her home in their packs. Years afterward, at a dinner thrown for the emperor Augustus, one of those officers admitted with a grin that the wreckers had never been punished by any angry goddess. On the contrary, he said, that very day he had the honor of serving the emperor a meal paid for out of one part of her golden hip. No lightning answered. That absence is the part people remembered.

For centuries before that night she had been, in a sense, the country itself worn in the shape of a woman. Her father was Aramazd, the sky-father at the head of the pantheon, and in the prayers of kings she was his issue and his glory, the great Lady Anahit, mother of all chastity and all knowledge, the one who kept the whole nation alive. By the fifth century before the common era she stood at the summit of Armenian worship, second to no god but her father. In the oldest layers of her story she had carried a harder office. She was a goddess of war first, the kind invoked before battle, and only later did the harvest, the spring, and the healing of bodies become the work she was loved for.

Where she came from is a question the stories cannot settle. Her name and much of her cult travel alongside the Iranian water-goddess Anahita, and one strong tradition holds that her worship reached Armenia from Persia during the Median and early Achaemenid centuries, carried in with the religion of the Persians and the Medes. Another line of scholarship pulls in the opposite direction, rooting her in the older highland country of Hayasa-Azzi and tying her to far more ancient mother-figures of the Near East, among them Inanna, with the Urartian goddess Arubani sometimes named as an earlier form of the same divine presence. The likeliest truth is layered rather than single. A local goddess of the Armenian uplands took on the dress and name of her Iranian cousin and kept growing.

Her temples studded the land. There were sanctuaries at Armavir, Artashat, and Ashtishat, but the heart of her cult was Eriza, in the district of Acilisene, where the temple was reckoned the wealthiest and most venerable in all Armenia. A whole mountain in Sophene was called her throne. The district around Eriza was named Anahit’s own province, and in time the Romans simply began calling the region Anaïtica, the land of Anaïtis, as though the goddess and the soil had stopped being separable. The temples were staffed by priests and by priestesses drawn from the leading families, young women who served at the shrine for a season of their lives before they married. The geographer Strabo described rites at her sanctuaries that scandalized later Christian writers, who preferred to forget them.

Once a year the kings came to her. Tradition bound every Armenian monarch to travel to Eriza for her festival, and even Tiridates, the king who would later make Armenia the first Christian kingdom, began his reign by making that journey, offering sacrifice and laying down wreaths and cut branches at her feet. Before his conversion he prayed to the great triad of Aramazd, Anahit, and Vahagn, but it was Anahit he favored, calling her the benefactress of the whole human race. Her national feast fell during Navasard, the new-year month, and it drew enormous crowds for dancing, music, recitals, and contests. The ill came too, climbing to her sanctuaries to ask for their health back. That is why the gilded bronze head of her statue became the emblem of Armenian medicine, a goddess reduced to a face and still expected to cure.

What survives of how she looked is mostly metal and rumor. She was cast in gold and in gilded bronze, shown as a composed and matronly woman, at times cradling a child, her hair worked into the heavy plaited style that marked Armenian women of rank. A bronze head with traces of gilding, recovered from Asia Minor and now famous, is widely believed to come from one of her statues, and it gives a fair sense of the cool, even gaze her worshippers would have met. The Greeks who described her reached for their own goddesses to explain her. The historian Berossus matched her with Aphrodite, while later Armenian scribes set her beside Artemis, and the Romans saw in her their Diana. None of the comparisons quite fit, because she did the work of all three at once.

Her powers ran along the lines of her domains. She made fields fruitful and women fertile, she sent water and the rains that fed the spring, she granted wisdom, and above all she healed, which is why pilgrimage and recovery were braided so tightly into her cult. Her older war-aspect never fully left her, lingering as a protective ferocity on behalf of the nation she mothered. Her limits were the limits of a god who lived inside an image and a place. She could be smashed. Her gold could be weighed, divided, and eaten through at a banquet. And when the kingdom turned to a new faith, the cult that had crowned her for a thousand years was dismantled in a generation. A fresh golden statue had been raised at Eriza after Antony’s soldiers ruined the first, and it stood and received worship right up until the days of Gregory the Illuminator, when the temples were thrown down and the great Lady of the Armenians went silent.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Anahit in Armenian mythology?

Anahit is the Armenian goddess of fertility, healing, wisdom, and water, and in early times a goddess of war. By the fifth century BCE she was the chief deity of Armenia alongside her father Aramazd, worshipped as the great mother and protector of the nation.

What was Anahit the goddess of?

Anahit governed fertility, healing, wisdom, and water, and she was honored as the benefactress and mother-protector of the Armenian people. Her earliest role was as a goddess of war, an aspect that survived as a protective fierceness on behalf of her nation.

What happened to the golden statue of Anahit?

During Mark Antony’s campaign in Armenia, Roman soldiers smashed the solid gold statue of Anahit at her temple in Eriza and divided the fragments among themselves. According to Pliny, one officer later boasted at a dinner for Augustus that he had once feasted on a piece of the goddess’s golden hip. The Armenians later erected a new golden statue that was worshipped until the kingdom’s conversion to Christianity.

Why is Anahit the symbol of Armenian medicine?

The sick made pilgrimages to Anahit’s temples to pray for recovery, which made her the central figure of healing in pre-Christian Armenia. Because of this, the gilded bronze head of her statue became the recognized emblem of ancient Armenian medicine.

How is Anahit related to the Persian goddess Anahita?

Anahit is closely related to the Iranian water-goddess Anahita, and one major tradition holds that her cult reached Armenia from Persia during the Median and early Achaemenid periods. Other scholars argue she was a native highland goddess of Hayasa-Azzi who absorbed the name and traits of her Iranian counterpart, so the two are linked but distinct.

Related Entries

Aramazd, Vahagn, Aralez, Vishap, Mher, Armenian Mythology, Al, Anahita, Inanna, Ishtar, Cybele, Aphrodite, Artemis