Tishtrya

For ten nights each high summer the brightest star in the sky lifted clear of the eastern horizon just before dawn, and across the Iranian plateau people who had spent weeks watching their wells drop stopped work to look at it. The ground was cracked to the depth of a hand. Cattle stood with their heads low in whatever shade they could find. Whether there would be grain that year was being decided somewhere overhead, and the hymn that describes the decision is unembarrassed about the mechanism. It was being settled by two horses fighting in the sea.

Tishtrya is Sirius. Not a god who lives in the star or governs it from somewhere else, but the star, addressed directly and worshipped by that name. The eighth hymn of the Avesta calls him white, shining, seen from far off, piercing the dark with undefiled rays, and then, in the same breath, loud-snorting. That is the moment the star and the animal stop being separable, and the tradition never really separates them again. Ahura Mazda set him over all the other stars in the way Zarathushtra was set over men, gave him a thousand senses, and made him a lord of a thousand boons who grants them to a man who has pleased him whether the man asks or not.

His name is old enough to be an argument. The most persuasive reading makes it mean something like the one who belongs to the three stars, tying Sirius to the three points of Orion’s Belt, which in Vedic India were seen as a three-jointed arrow. The arrow follows him everywhere. He flies toward the cosmic sea as fast as the shaft loosed by Erekhsha, the swiftest archer among the Aryans, who shot from Mount Khshaotha to Mount Hvanvant. The Mesopotamians had already named Sirius the Arrow in both Sumerian and Akkadian. In Egypt an archer goddess shot at it; in China a celestial emperor shot at it. Different sky-watchers looking at the same white point, all of them reaching for the same weapon.

He was made for a purpose, and Ahura Mazda states it plainly. Tishtrya was created as worthy of sacrifice and prayer and glorification as Ahura Mazda himself, and created specifically to break the Pairika Duzyairya, the Bad Year, a witch who would otherwise spend every day and every night trying to snuff the life out of the material world. People frightened of her did not say her name. They called her Huyairya, the Good Year, and hoped it would take.

The thirty nights are the strangest and best part of the story. For ten nights Tishtrya mixes his shape with light and moves as a man of fifteen, bright, clear-eyed, tall, strong and quick, with the strength and the virility of the first man. For the next ten he is a bull with golden horns. For the last ten he is a white horse with golden ears and a golden caparison. In every shape he calls for people to assemble and asks the same question, which is who will bring him the libations, the haoma and the holy meat. Only the reward changes with the body. The young man offers a troop of sons. The bull offers a herd of oxen. The horse offers horses.

Then he goes down in the horse body into Vourukasha, the deep salt sea, and something comes up to meet him. Apaosha is a dark horse, black with black ears, black with a black back, black with a black tail, and stamped all over with brands of terror. They meet hoof against hoof. They fight for three days and three nights, and the drought wins.

What follows is the reason the hymn is worth reading. Tishtrya runs, and as he runs he cries out in open distress: men do not worship him with a sacrifice in which he is called by his own name, as they worship the other yazatas by theirs. Had they done it, he says, he would have had in him the strength of ten horses, ten camels, ten bulls, ten mountains, ten rivers. He did not lose because Apaosha was stronger. He lost because he had not been paid. The rain god was beaten by his own neglected accounts.

So Ahura Mazda performs the sacrifice himself, naming Tishtrya properly, and hands him the ten-fold strength he had been missing. Tishtrya goes down a second time. This time the fight ends at noon, and Apaosha runs. Then the shout of triumph, the water loosed to the big-seeded cornfields and the small-seeded pastures and the whole of the living world, and the sea itself churning: shores boiling over, the middle boiling over, vapour lifting off Mount Us-hindu that stands in the centre of the water. The cloud forms, the wind gets behind it, and Apam Napat parcels the rain out among the seven regions of the earth, with sleet at the tail end of it.

The second myth in the hymn is smaller and colder. Angra Mainyu flings the Pairikas up as worm-stars, the falling and streaking lights, to wreck the steady order of the fixed stars on which the rains depend. Tishtrya blows them off the sea and binds Duzyairya with twofold and threefold bonds all over her body, as if a thousand of the strongest men alive were holding down one.

His powers all run out of the same root. He holds the seed of the waters, so he gives rain, fertility, health and increase, and he shares the work with Satavaesa and with the other water-bearing stars. Neither Angra Mainyu nor the sorcerers nor all the daevas together can put him to death. Later Zoroastrian writing keeps him as Tishtar, commander of the fixed stars of the eastern quarter, protector of travellers, and gives him an odd ally in the three-legged ass that stands in the sea and purifies it.

His weakness is not a monster or a weapon. It is human carelessness. The hymn spells out the terms in the flat voice of a contract: libations, tied bundles of baresma, and a beast cooked for him of a single colour throughout, whether white or black or any other. If a murderer takes of that offering, or someone who will not sing the Gathas, Tishtrya withdraws his healing virtues, and then the plagues arrive and the hostile hordes arrive and the Aryan lands are cut down by their fifties and their hundreds and their thousands. He is a god who can be starved. The fourth month of the Zoroastrian year still carries his name, and the thirteenth day of every month is his, and the midsummer festival held on that day still turns on water.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tishtrya?

Tishtrya is the Zoroastrian yazata of rainfall, identified directly with the star Sirius. The eighth hymn of the Avesta, the Tishtar Yasht, is dedicated to him, and Ahura Mazda is said to have set him over all other stars. He is best known for fighting the drought demon Apaosha in the shape of a white stallion.

What is the myth of Tishtrya and Apaosha?

Tishtrya descends into the cosmic sea Vourukasha as a white horse with golden ears, and the demon Apaosha rushes up to meet him as a black horse marked with brands of terror. They fight hoof against hoof for three days and three nights, and Tishtrya loses because he has not been worshipped by his own name. Ahura Mazda then performs the sacrifice for him personally, gives him the strength of ten horses, ten camels, ten bulls, ten mountains and ten rivers, and Tishtrya wins the rematch by noon, releasing the rain.

Why does Tishtrya take three different forms?

Tishtrya spends ten nights in each of three bodies before the battle: a bright, clear-eyed man of fifteen, a bull with golden horns, and a white horse with golden ears and golden trappings. In each shape he asks who will offer him libations, haoma and holy meat, and the reward he promises matches the body, offering sons as a man, oxen as a bull, and horses as a horse. The three forms are widely read as marking the period from the summer rising of Sirius to the late-summer meteor showers.

What is Tishtrya’s weakness?

Tishtrya’s only real weakness is being neglected by the people who depend on him. He is explicitly beyond the reach of Angra Mainyu, the sorcerers and all the daevas together, but he loses his first battle with Apaosha purely because he was not invoked by his own name. The hymn also warns that if a murderer or someone who refuses to sing the Gathas takes part in his offerings, he withdraws his healing power and plague and invasion follow.

Is Tishtrya the same as Tir?

Tishtrya and Tir became closely identified in later Iranian tradition, though they did not start out as the same being. Tir was originally the god of the planet Mercury and a protector of scribes, and after the planets were demonised the Pahlavi sources become contradictory, with one passage making Tishtar and Tir identical and another making Tir the equivalent of Apaosha. Zoroastrians today still call the hymn to Tishtrya the Tir Yasht, and the fourth month of the calendar carries the name Tir.

Related Entries

Ahura Mazda, Angra Mainyu, Amesha Spenta, Mithra, Anahita, Haoma, Atar, Vohu Manah, Zoroaster, Div, Peri, Simurgh, Zahhak, Fereydun, Indra