Gayomart

On the left bank of a river at the middle of the world stood a shining thing four reeds tall and exactly as broad, round, and bright enough to hurt the eye. Across the water, at the same distance again, stood a bull. Neither of them moved. They held those two positions for three thousand years while the sky turned over them and nothing happened, because nothing had yet been made that could happen. That was the entire population of creation.

The shining thing was Gayomart, and the Zoroastrian books of creation make him the sixth thing Ohrmazd built, after the sky, the water, the earth, the plants and the animals. His body was taken from the earth, which in this theology means it was taken from Spandarmad, the divine being who is the earth, and his seed was made from the brightness of the sky. Into him and into the ox, and into nothing else that had been made, Ohrmazd put a seed whose origin was fire. The Bundahishn is entirely unembarrassed about what follows from that parentage. Spandarmad is Ohrmazd’s own daughter, so the first man is the child of a father and his daughter, and the priests who compiled these books pressed the point on purpose, as evidence that next of kin marriage was as old as the world.

Three thousand years of stillness were possible only because the Evil Spirit could not bring himself to move. He had looked at the righteous man and fallen into a stupor, and the arch demons stood over him shouting at him to get up, twice reciting their own atrocities to encourage him, and it did not work. What worked was Jeh. She arrived at the end of the three thousand years and promised to pour so much misery over the righteous man and the labouring ox that life itself would stop being wanted, and she said it twice, and Ahriman got up and kissed her on the head.

He came in at noon, in the first month of the year, sliding out of the sky like a snake out of a hole. He pierced the middle of the earth. He went at the vegetation and it withered while he watched. He went at the ox, then at Gayomart, then at the fire, and behind him the ground filled with biting and venomous things until, in the phrase the text keeps returning to, not so much as the point of a needle was left free of them. Over the ox and the man he poured avarice, want, pain, hunger, disease, lust and lethargy. At midday it was as dark as a night with no moon in it.

Ohrmazd got there first, but barely. In the time it takes to recite a single stanza of prayer he drew a sweat out of Gayomart and shaped it, the text says, into the body of a radiant, tall young man of fifteen. Translators have quarrelled over that sentence for a century, because it can also be read as a personified Sleep in the shape of a radiant youth, laid over him like a blanket. Either way, when Gayomart came out of the sweat he opened his eyes on a world gone black at noon, the heavens wheeling, the sun and moon still running their courses, and the ground moving with creatures that had not been there when he closed them.

Ahriman sent Astwihad, the demon of death, against him with a thousand assistants whose only work was killing, and Astwihad could get no noose on him, because his appointed time had not come. Time had allotted Gayomart thirty years, and thirty years was what he got, not a day more and not a day less. He spent them saying one sentence. Mankind will all be of my race, he said, and this one thing is good, when they perform duty and good works. Then he died on schedule. The first man of the Zoroastrian world never does anything.

His usefulness is entirely posthumous. The ox fell to the right hand and Gayomart fell to the left, and out of the parts of his body came seven kinds of metal, eight in the reckoning of Zadspram. His seed was scoured clean by the light of the sun. Neryosang, the messenger who carries Ohrmazd’s words down to men, took charge of two portions of it, and Spandarmad, who was at once his maker and his mother, received the third.

Forty years later something came up out of that ground. It was a rivas plant, a single stem of the sour rhubarb whose juice Persians still use to sharpen a drink, and it carried fifteen leaves for fifteen years. Inside the stem were two human shapes with their arms resting back against their shoulders and their waists so closely grown together that it was not clear which was the man and which the woman. Then they stopped being a plant and became people, and the breath went into them, and they were Mashya and Mashyoi. Ohrmazd told them to think good thoughts, speak good words, do good deeds and worship no demons. They washed themselves, and the first words they spoke were that Ohrmazd had made the water and the earth, the plants and the animals, the stars and the moon and the sun. Then something turned over in their minds and they said it had been the Evil Spirit instead, and that was the first lie anyone ever told.

The same book supplies Gayomart’s birth horoscope, which is also the horoscope of the world, and it is exact about the manner of his death. The malefic Saturn came back round to its exaltation, Jupiter went down into descension, and the first man died on the schedule the sky had written for him. That is what a cosmology looks like when the astrologers and the priests are the same men.

For a figure this central, the older scripture gives almost nothing. He appears in a single verse of the hymn to the guardian spirits: the fravashi of Gaya Maretan, who first listened to the thought and the teaching of Ahura Mazda, and out of whom Ahura formed the race of the Aryan nations and their seed. That is close to the whole of it. His Avestan name is barely a name. Gaya marətan means mortal life, two ordinary words that hardened into a person, and India did the same thing with Martanda, the miscarried lump that Aditi’s other sons threw out. The Iranian myth as it survives was assembled by the Mazdean clergy of the Sasanian centuries. Nobody sang it, which is exactly why he never travelled as far as Jamshid or Fereydun.

Even his title is unsettled. One text calls him garshah, king of the mountain. Another calls him gilshah, king of clay. A Sanskrit version of the same passage simply has great king, and the Islamic historians swap between the first two without appearing to notice. The mountain reading looks older, and the clay probably arrived under pressure from the neighbouring traditions in which the first man is moulded out of mud. The Shahnameh gives kayshah, which cannot be right, since kay is the title of a dynasty that had not happened yet.

Around the year 1000 he walks into that poem as Kayumars, and the priestly giant is gone. Ferdowsi opens by admitting he has nothing: no one knows anything about those first days except what has been handed down from father to son. His Kayumars is the first man to take the crown and to establish the ceremonies that go with it, and he takes it in the mountains. He and his people dress in leopard skin. He teaches them the preparation of food and the making of clothes, both new in the world at that time. He reigns thirty years, the same thirty, and every animal wild and tame comes and bows in front of his throne.

He also has a son to lose. Ahriman’s own son raises an army, and the angel Sorush comes to warn the prince Siamak, wrapped in a leopard skin himself. Siamak goes out to fight in nothing but that skin, because armour has not been invented, and the black demon sinks his claws into the unprotected body and lays him in the dust. Kayumars comes down off the throne, beating his head and scoring his own flesh until his face is smeared with blood. The whole army goes into blue. The wild animals and the birds of the air climb weeping into the mountains, and the dust they raise hangs in the air over the court through a year of mourning, until Sorush comes back with an order to stop grieving and fight. The grandson Hushang does the killing. He catches the black demon, cleaves the body in two, severs the head and flays the carcass, and Kayumars gets his revenge and dies immediately.

Whatever power he has runs in one direction only, outward from his corpse, and almost none of it is his own doing. Ohrmazd does the protecting, Time does the allotting, Astwihad does the killing to a timetable. He cannot be murdered ahead of schedule and he cannot be kept alive past it, and between those two facts there is very little left for him to decide. When the Muslim historians inherited him they made the obvious identification and folded him into Adam, and one account has Adam choosing two sons out of many, Sheth and Kayumard, and handing the religion to the first and the kingdom and the affairs of the world to the second.

The last thing his own scripture has to say about him is not about the beginning at all. Gayomart is the first of the Zoroastrian dead to be raised when the world is made new, and he is raised alongside Soshyans, the saviour who is also the last man. The first man and the last one stand up together.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gayomart?

Gayomart is the first man in Zoroastrian myth and the first king in Iranian legendary history. He was the sixth of Ohrmazd’s creations, made on the bank of a river at the middle of the world, and he stood there facing the primeval ox for three thousand years before the Evil Spirit attacked. In the Persian epic tradition he becomes Kayumars, founder of the first dynasty.

How did Gayomart die?

Ahriman sent Astwihad, the demon of death, against Gayomart with a thousand demons, but they could do nothing until his allotted span ran out. Time had fixed his life at thirty years, and he lived exactly that long after the assault on creation before dying. The Bundahishn even gives the astrology of it, with Saturn returned to its exaltation and Jupiter in descension.

What came out of Gayomart’s body?

Seven kinds of metal came from the parts of his body, and eight according to Zadspram. His seed was purified by the light of the sun, two portions going to the messenger Neryosang and one to Spandarmad, the earth. Forty years later that seed grew into a rhubarb plant which turned into Mashya and Mashyoi, the first human couple.

Is Gayomart the same as Kayumars in the Shahnameh?

Yes. Kayumars is the New Persian form of the same name, which is Gayōmard in Middle Persian and Gaya Maretan in the Avesta. The figure changes a great deal between the two bodies of writing: the Zoroastrian books describe a shining giant who dies without acting, while Ferdowsi’s Kayumars is a mountain king in leopard skin who teaches his people to cook and to make clothes.

Why does the Avesta say so little about Gayomart?

The Avesta names him in only a handful of places, chiefly one verse of the hymn to the guardian spirits, where he is the first to accept Ahura Mazda’s teaching and the ancestor of the Aryan nations. Almost everything else, including his height, his horoscope and his death, comes from Middle Persian books compiled centuries later by Zoroastrian priests. Scholars treat the developed myth as largely a work of that priestly tradition rather than an inherited epic.

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Ahura Mazda, Angra Mainyu, Zoroaster, Sraosha, Amesha Spenta, Hadhayosh, Fereydun, Zahhak, Div, Atar, Kaveh the Blacksmith, Rostam, Adam, Ymir, Purusha