Verethragna

The wind came first. Not a breeze off the hills but a shoving, bodily thing that pressed the breath back into a man’s chest and laid the grass flat in one long stroke, and inside it something was speaking. It said it was the strongest thing in strength, the most victorious in victory, the most glorious in glory. Then it was gone over the ridge and Zarathushtra was left in the settling dust, and the smell of the dust was the smell of a road in high summer. Nine more times the visitor came back, wearing nine more bodies, and every time it said the same enormous sentence about itself.

That is the shape of the Bahram Yasht, the fourteenth of the great Avestan hymns, and it is one of the strangest catalogues in Iranian religion. A bull arrives with yellow ears and horns of gold, and floating on the horns are Strength and Victory, personified and riding along. A white horse comes next in a golden caparison with the same two powers balanced on its forehead. Then a camel in rut, sharp-toothed and long-haired, throwing white foam from its mouth, whose piercing look carries across the dark. Then a boar with a dripping face that kills at one stroke and keeps coming. Then a youth of fifteen, shining, clear-eyed, thin-heeled, which is the Avesta’s way of saying a body at the exact top of its powers. Then a raven, the swiftest of all flying things, the one creature alive that can overtake a well-shot arrow, who climbs at the first crack of dawn because he wants the night finished and grazes the hidden ways of the mountains and the tops of the trees, listening to the other birds. Then a wild ram with horns bent round. Then a fighting buck. And then, last, a man, bright and beautiful, holding a sword with a golden blade inlaid with every sort of ornament.

Each of the ten brings the Glory with him, the khvarenah, the burning royal luck that settles on kings and leaves them again without warning. The ram carries a long echo: in the Persian tradition a wild ram runs after Ardashir as he flees Ardavan, and Ardavan, watching it go, understands that the Glory has changed sides and that he has already lost.

His name is not really a name. Vərəθra means an obstacle, a blocking, a resistance; the second half is the smiting of it. Avestan also keeps the plain noun and the plain adjective, and the adjective gets attached to the hero Thraetaona and to the world-renewing Saoshyants, so the word floats free of the person who bears it. The same compound survives in India as vṛtrahán, the standing epithet of Indra, who is famous for killing a dragon named Vṛtra. Whether Iran stripped a dragon-slayer of his dragon or India built a dragon out of an abstract noun has been argued for a century. Nobody has settled it. What is clear is that the older job was clearing an obstruction, the kind that dams a river, and the monster came afterwards.

He is not a god of glory in the abstract. He is offensive force, the thing that hits first and does not stop, and the hymn keeps him permanently at war against demons and wizards and pairikas, against the blind and the deaf and the men who lie. He goes up and down the armies with Mithra and Rashnu, asking aloud which of them has lied to Mithra and which has thrown his oath against the truth, and deciding who gets illness and death.

What he gave Zarathushtra was oddly specific and only partly military. Victory in thinking, in speaking, in doing, in addressing and in answering, which is a warrior’s gift and a debater’s gift at once, from a culture that took the verbal contest as seriously as the physical one. Then the strength of the arms, the health and hardness of the whole body, and three separate kinds of eyesight: the eye of the Kara fish, which can measure a ripple no thicker than a hair in a river a thousand men deep; the eye of a stallion, which can find a single hair lying on the ground on a rainy night and tell whether it came from the head or the tail; the eye of the golden-collared vulture, which from nine districts away can pick out a piece of flesh the size of a fist.

The raven form leaves the strangest residue. A feather of that bird, rubbed over your own body, throws a curse back on the men who laid it on you; hold one of its bones or feathers and nobody can strike you down or make you run. Before a battle you throw four feathers into the ground between the armies, and victory goes to whichever side worships Strength and Verethragna first. The hymn then locks the spell shut. Show it to nobody, Ahura Mazda says, except a father to his son, or a brother to a brother out of the same womb, or a priest to his pupil.

The limits are written just as plainly. His power runs on correct ritual and nothing else. Bring him libations, tie the baresma bundles, cook him a head of cattle white or black or any colour at all provided every part of it is the same colour. Let a murderer take of that offering, or a whore, or anyone who will not sing the Gathas, and Verethragna takes back his healing virtues, and after that the hostile hordes come and the plague comes and the Aryan countries are cut down by their thousands and their tens of thousands. He is bought, not befriended.

Under Hellenism the Iranians handed him to Ares and to Herakles, and the syncretism is fixed in stone at Nemrut Dağı, where Antiochus I of Commagene names one god in a row of three: Artagnes, Herakles, Ares. Kushan coinage shows him as ORLAGNO in a winged headdress. The Pahlavi astrologers gave his name to the planet Mars. In Armenia he became Vahagn, drawn from Iran and given a dragon of his own. Later Zoroastrian tradition promoted him to the seventh of the Amahraspandan for driving Ahriman back down into hell, and sent him to walk beside the newly dead for their first three days with Sraosha and the good Way. He kept the great fire temples too, the Atash Bahram, though the scholarly reading is that these were originally the victorious fire, the adjective, and that the god acquired them later by a natural confusion over his own name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Verethragna?

Verethragna is the Zoroastrian god of victory, known in Middle Persian as Warahrān and in modern Persian as Bahrām. His Avestan name means “smiting of resistance,” and the Avesta calls him the best-armed of all the gods. He is celebrated in the Bahram Yasht, the fourteenth hymn of the Avesta.

What are the ten forms of Verethragna?

Verethragna appeared to Zarathushtra ten times in ten different bodies: a wind, a golden-horned bull, a white horse, a camel, a boar, a youth of fifteen, a raven, a ram, a wild buck, and finally a man carrying a golden-bladed sword. Each form brought with it the khvarenah, the divine Glory associated with kingship. The Avesta assigns some of these same shapes to other divinities, including Tishtrya and Vayu.

What did Verethragna give Zarathushtra?

He gave Zarathushtra victory in thought, speech, action, address and reply, along with strength of arm and complete bodily health. He also granted three kinds of extraordinary eyesight, modelled on the Kara fish, the stallion and the golden-collared vulture. These gifts show that his power covered verbal contest and physical wellbeing as well as warfare.

What is the magic of the raven’s feather?

In the Bahram Yasht, a feather from the raven form of Verethragna can be rubbed on the body to turn a curse back on the person who cast it, and anyone holding such a feather or bone cannot be struck down or put to flight. Four feathers thrown between two armies decide the battle in favour of whichever side worships Verethragna first. Ahura Mazda orders the spell kept secret, passed only from father to son, brother to full brother, or priest to pupil.

Is Verethragna related to the Hindu god Indra?

The two are linked through a shared Indo-Iranian inheritance rather than being the same figure. Verethragna’s name corresponds to the Vedic epithet vṛtrahán, which is applied to Indra as the slayer of the dragon Vṛtra. Scholars have argued for over a century about whether Iran removed the dragon from an older dragon-slayer or India invented one, and the question remains open.

Related Entries

Mithra, Rashnu, Sraosha, Ahura Mazda, Anahita, Atar, Haoma, Angra Mainyu, Aka Manah, Zahhak, Fereydun, Vahagn, Indra, Ares, Nergal