Sraosha

In the third watch of the night, when the household fire has sunk to a sullen orange and every human being under the roof is deep asleep, the flame itself starts begging. Atar, fire and son of Ahura Mazda, calls the master of the house and gets nothing. He calls the farmer and gets nothing. Something is coming through the dark to eat the last of the wood and put him out of the world, and on the third call he stops asking men altogether and calls Sraosha.

What Sraosha does next is the least grand and most revealing thing any Iranian god does. He does not come down in glory. He wakes up a rooster.

The bird is Parodarsh, “he who foresees the coming dawn”, although the Vendidad notes with some asperity that ill-speaking people call him Kahrkatas. He lifts his voice against the last of the night and shouts the house awake, and what he shouts is a warning. Bushyasta the long-handed is on her way, the demon of sleep, who lulls the whole living world back under the moment it stirs and murmurs, sleep, poor man, the time is not yet come. Whichever of two bedfellows gets up first, the text promises, enters paradise first. The whole cosmic emergency comes down to who reaches the woodpile with clean hands.

That is the shape of him. Sraosha is enormous and he works through small things.

His name is an ordinary Avestan noun that hardened into a person. It comes from the verb “to hear”, and it means hearkening, obedience, the discipline of doing what you have been told, and the texts never entirely stop using it both ways. In the Gathas, the oldest layer of the Avesta, Zarathustra says “I shall invoke Sraosha, mightiest of all”, and the verb he uses is the one reserved for calling on a god. There is no counterpart to him anywhere in the Vedas, which suggests he is not an inheritance from a shared Indo-Iranian past but something the Iranians made for themselves.

The later hymns build him a body. He is tall, good-looking, strong in the arms, and repeatedly called the strongest, bravest, swiftest and most dreaded from afar of all youths. His standing epithet marks his weapon: he is the one with the strong wooden club. It is not an idle detail, because his opposite number Aeshma, wrath and rapine, carries the club of gore, and the two are described as a matched and opposed pair, created by Ahura Mazda expressly so that one would meet the other.

His house stands on the highest height of high Haraiti, a thousand pillars holding it up, lit from within by its own light and studded with stars on the outside. Four horses draw him, white and shining, quick to learn, obeying before speech and taking their orders from the mind. Their hooves are horn covered over with gold. They are faster than horses, faster than the wind, faster than falling rain or driving cloud or a well-winged bird or a well-shot arrow, and while they run down anything that flees them, nothing overtakes them. On that team he crosses from India in the east and comes down in the west.

Three times a day and three times a night he descends to Hvaniratha, the central continent, gripping in both hands a blade-heavy axe that seems to fly of its own accord, and he brings it down on the skulls of the demons. He has not slept since the two Spirits made their creations. After sunset he strikes Aeshma a bloody wound and, having taken the head, drops him the way a strong man drops a weak one.

He was also the first priest. He spread the barsman twigs before anyone else, first in threes and fives and sevens and nines until the bundle stood knee high, and he was the first to chant the five Gathas of Zarathustra in their proper metre and word order. Ahura Mazda taught him the Religion directly, which is why he teaches it. In that mode his weapons change: the Ahuna Vairya prayer becomes his victorious axe, along with the Yasna Haptanghaiti, the Fshusho-mathra and every sacrificial act performed correctly.

The Vendidad gives him one genuinely strange scene. He stands over the Druj, the female personification of the Lie, with his club lowered onto her, and interrogates her about how she conceives offspring with no male. She names four sins as her lovers, and he asks after each one what undoes it. The first is a man who, asked by one of the faithful, gives nothing from the wealth he has piled up. The undoing is that a man should give something unasked, however little, and the Druj admits that this tears the child out of her as thoroughly as a wolf.

For all his fame as escort of the dead, that role belongs to the later tradition rather than the oldest one. The Avesta says only that in battle Mithra drives the terrified regiments one way, Rashnu drives them another, and Sraosha chases them everywhere. It is the Pahlavi books that seat those same three at the Chinwad Bridge to judge the newly dead. There, for three days after death, Srosh is called on to guard a soul that is hovering in a dangerous in-between and exposed to demons, and on the fourth day he walks it to the crossing.

He survived the coming of Islam in Iran by becoming an angel. In the Shahnameh, Fereydun has Zahhak beaten and pinned and the mace is already up, and Surush catches him: this one’s time has not yet come. Bind him instead. So the tyrant is dragged to Damavand and nailed into a cave inside the mountain to wait out the rest of the world.

His powers follow from what he is. Because he hears, he never stops watching. Because he was the first celebrant, ritual itself is a weapon in his hands. Because he was made as the answer to wrath, he wins every night and finishes nothing. The Pahlavi tradition pushes this near to co-rule: Ohrmazd is ruler in the spirit world and Srosh is ruler in the material one, Ohrmazd protects the soul and Srosh protects the body, and alone among the divinities Srosh is worshipped by himself rather than alongside the creator.

The limits are just as consistent. That authority is delegated, held by command of the Creator and not by his own right. His defeat of Aeshma is provisional until the world is made new, at which point he finally puts the demon of wrath down for good. His protection turns on being invited, since the hymn is explicit that he wards famine and calamity from the house in which he is fed and made welcome. And the god who never sleeps, who holds up the material creation, who no ritual can do without, needs a bird to shout at a farmer before any of it can start.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sraosha in Zoroastrianism?

Sraosha is a major yazata, or divine being, whose name means hearkening or obedience. He is the messenger and embodiment of Ahura Mazda’s holy word, the first being to perform the ritual, and the sleepless guardian who defends the material world from demons after sunset. He is known in Middle Persian as Srosh and in New Persian as Surush or Sorush.

What weapon does Sraosha carry?

Sraosha’s standing epithet in the Avesta identifies him as the god with the strong wooden club. The hymns also describe a blade-heavy axe he holds in both hands, which he brings down on the skulls of demons three times each day and three times each night. In his priestly role his weapons are prayers instead, above all the Ahuna Vairya.

Why is the rooster sacred in Zoroastrianism?

The rooster is Parodarsh, “he who foresees the coming dawn”, and the Vendidad names him as Sraosha’s agent. In the last part of the night Sraosha wakes the bird, and the bird crows the household awake to say their prayers and tend the fire before Bushyasta, the demon of sleep, can lull them back under. Giving a pair of these birds to one of the faithful is treated as an enormous act of merit.

Who is Sraosha’s enemy?

His designated enemy is Aeshma, the demon of wrath and rapine. Ahura Mazda is said to have created Sraosha specifically to withstand him, and the two are described as a mirrored pair, one carrying the strong club and the other the bloody one. Sraosha wounds Aeshma every night after sunset but only destroys him for good at the renovation of the world.

Does Sraosha judge the dead?

In the later Pahlavi tradition he sits with Mithra and Rashnu at the Chinwad Bridge where souls are judged, and he alone escorts the soul across. The older Avestan texts do not give him that role, mentioning the three together only as a battlefield trio. For the first three days after a death he is invoked to protect the soul, and he leads it to the bridge on the fourth.

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