Vourukasha

Ten fish swim a slow circle at the bottom of the world’s water, and the formation has never once broken. One head is always turned toward the lizard. The lizard is always there. Neither creature eats, because neither needs to, and they have been locked in this arrangement since the first day of creation. What they are circling is a tree. What the tree is for is the resurrection of the dead.

The water is Vouru.kaša, the sea of wide inlets, and the Pahlavi books that inherited it call it Frāxkard and Warkaš and rank it above every other sea there is. It lies south of the peak of Harā, the great mountain at the middle of the world, and it covers a third of the earth. The water of a thousand lakes is held in it. Some of those lakes are so wide that a man on a good horse would need forty days to ride around one. It is salt, it is deep, and in the middle of it a mountain called Us-hindu rises out of the swell with vapour coming off it.

It began as rain. The cloud came up from the right side of the sun, shaped like a wine cup, and it rained for thirty days and thirty nights without stopping, and what it was washing out of the earth was poison. The Evil Spirit had put venom into the water and the soil and the plants, and this first enormous rain carried the contamination down and pooled it, and the pool was the ocean. That is why the great sea is salt and the spring that feeds it is sweet.

The spring is Ardvi Sura Anahita, and she arrives from a height called Hukairya, all gold and sheer drops, from a hundred times the height of a man. She comes down through a thousand channels, each one as long as a forty-day ride, and when she strikes the sea the effect is not gentle. All the shores boil over. All the middle boils over. The water she brings is warm and clear and purifying, and a branch of her golden channel reaches out to Mount Us-hindu in the middle of the ocean, where part of it pours into the sea to clean it and part of it drizzles as fine moisture over the whole earth, so that everything Ahura Mazda made takes its health from the same source.

Something else stands in that water, and it is one of the stranger things in any cosmology. It is an ass with three legs, six eyes, nine mouths, two ears, one hollow golden horn and a white body, and it eats nothing at all because its food is spiritual. Each of its three feet covers as much ground as a thousand sheep lying down together. Its ears take in the whole of Mazendaran. When it dips its neck into the sea and shakes, the entire ocean shudders. When it brays, every female water creature of the good creation conceives on the spot, and every pregnant noxious thing in the water miscarries. When it urinates, the sea is cleaned, in all seven regions at once, of the poison that was put there at the beginning. Every donkey that walks into a pond and relieves itself is, on this reasoning, doing sacred work.

The sea’s great annual crisis is a horse fight. Tishtrya, the star Sirius, comes down to Vourukasha in the shape of a white stallion with golden ears and a golden caparison. Rushing to meet him comes Apaosha, the demon of drought, in the shape of a horse black in body, black in ears, black in back, black in tail, marked with brands of terror. They meet hoof against hoof and fight for three days and three nights, and the drought wins. Tishtrya flees a hathra’s length from the shore and cries out that he was beaten because nobody sacrifices to him by his own name. So Ahura Mazda performs the sacrifice himself and hands him the strength of ten horses, ten camels, ten bulls, ten mountains and ten rivers, and Tishtrya goes back down to the water. This time the fight ends at noon and the black horse runs. Then the sea boils from shore to centre, vapour rises off Mount Us-hindu, and Satavaesa spreads the water out over the seven regions of the earth while Apam Napat, the swift-horsed Son of the Waters, divides it among the countries.

The same sea holds the Glory, the khvarenah that cannot be seized by force. It fled from Yima when he began to lie, passed through the hands of Mithra and Thraetaona and Keresaspa, survived a fight between Fire and the three-mouthed dragon over which of them would have it, and then swelled up and went down into Vourukasha, where Apam Napat took it to the bottom. Frangrasyan the Turanian wanted it. He stripped himself naked and went in after it, and the Glory moved, and where it moved an arm of the sea opened that is now called Lake Husravah. He came out cursing and went back in. The Glory moved again, and Lake Vanghazdau was made. He went in a third time and the water called Awzhdanva was made, and that was the end of it. He never got it. The only mark he left on the sea was three new bays where he had failed.

In the deep mud at the bottom grows the Gaokerena, the white Haoma, the tree whose fruit is immortality and from which the renovation of the world will be prepared. The Evil Spirit put a lizard in the water to gnaw it, and Ohrmazd answered with the Kar fish, which never stop circling it and never turn their heads away. The number of fish is one of the few things the tradition cannot agree on: the Bundahishn as West translated it says ten, the Greater Bundahishn says two. What both say is that the contest runs until the end of the world, that the fish are the greatest of the good creation and the lizard the greatest of the bad, and that anything living which drifts between them gets cut in half. The exception is a fish called the Vas of Panchasadvaran, so long that a man running from dawn until sundown would not cover its body, and under whose protection all the other water creatures live.

A second tree grows out in the middle of the same water, the tree of many seeds, and inside its seed are all the plants there are. Once a year a bird settles on it, strips it, and scatters the seed into the sea, and Tishtrya gathers it up with the rain and rains it down over every region of the earth. Nine mountains are formed inside that tree’s bark, shot through with nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine myriad channels, and the water that leaves them is the source of every sea in the seven regions.

There are limits, and the tradition is honest about them. The sea cannot cleanse itself: it needs the ass, and the fish, and Anahita arriving from the mountain. Its neighbour the Putik is thick and salt and stinking, rises and falls with the moon on two winds that blow out of the Gulf of Satavaesa, and would push its foulness into the great ocean if Satavaesa did not drive back what is unclean and let only what is pure go through to the source. The lizard is never killed, only held. And the sea gives nothing to anyone who comes to take. Keresaspa had to ask Anahita for help against the golden-heeled Gandarewa even with all the shores of Vourukasha boiling over, and when Frangrasyan asked the same goddess for the Glory waving in the middle of that water, she simply refused him.

Scholars reading the Avesta alongside the Indian material notice that the Tree of All Seeds south of the peak of Harā stands in the same relation to Iranian cosmography as the Jambū tree south of Mount Meru does to Indian, and treat the whole picture as inherited Indo-Iranian myth rather than as a chart. That does not mean it is untethered from any real geography. It means the question of which water, if any, is not settled, and has not been for a long time. Meanwhile the fish keep turning, and they are said to be sensitive enough to feel the scratch of a needle’s point by which the water rises, or by which it is going down.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Vourukasha?

Vourukasha is the cosmic world sea of Zoroastrian and Persian mythology, a vast body of salt water lying south of the peak of Harā and covering a third of the earth. Its Avestan name means roughly “having wide shores” or “of many inlets,” and in Middle Persian it becomes Frāxkard or Warkaš. It holds the water of a thousand lakes and is the source from which every river and sea on earth is fed.

What grows in the sea Vourukasha?

Two trees. The Gaokerena, also called the white Haoma, grows in the deep mud at the bottom and is the tree of immortality from which the renovation of the world will be prepared. The tree of many seeds grows in the middle of the sea and contains the seed of every plant that exists, which a bird scatters into the water once a year for Tishtrya to rain over the whole earth.

Why do fish circle the tree in Vourukasha?

Because the Evil Spirit placed a lizard in the water to destroy the tree of immortality, and Ohrmazd created the Kar fish to keep it away. The fish circle the tree continuously with one head always turned toward the lizard, they need no food, and they will go on doing it until the end of the world. The sources disagree on whether there are ten of them or two.

What happens in the sea Vourukasha each year?

The rain is won or lost there. Tishtrya, the star Sirius, comes down to the sea as a white stallion with golden ears and fights the drought demon Apaosha, who appears as a black horse. Apaosha wins the first bout, and only after Ahura Mazda sacrifices to Tishtrya and gives him the strength of ten horses, camels, bulls, mountains and rivers does Tishtrya return and drive him off at noon, releasing the waters.

Who tried to steal the Glory from Vourukasha?

The Turanian Frangrasyan. The kingly Glory, the khvarenah that cannot be taken by force, went down into Vourukasha where Apam Napat seized it, and Frangrasyan stripped naked and dived after it three times. The Glory fled each time and each failure opened a new arm of the sea, named in the Zamyad Yasht as Lake Husravah, Lake Vanghazdau and the water Awzhdanva.

Related Entries

Tishtrya, Anahita, Haoma, Ahura Mazda, Angra Mainyu, Atar, Mithra, Verethragna, Vayu, Simurgh, Zahhak, Fereydun, Apsu, Nun, Mount Meru (Sumeru)