Goddess of the Waters
Anahita, in full Aredvi Sura Anahita, "the moist, the strong, the immaculate," is the Zoroastrian goddess of the waters, of fertility and increase. The fifth Yasht of the Avesta, the Aban Yasht, is devoted entirely to her and dresses her in exact detail: a strong fair maiden, high-girdled, wearing a gleaming mantle of thirty beaver skins and a golden crown set with a hundred stars and eight rays, with earrings and a necklace of gold. Her river falls from the peak of Hukairya into the world sea Vourukasha, equal in volume to all the rivers of the earth together, and her chariot is drawn by four horses: wind, rain, cloud, and sleet.
The Aban Yasht catalogues her petitioners, a miniature roll of Persian legend: righteous men such as Yima and Thraetaona — the later Jamshid and Fereydun — sacrifice to her and are granted victory, while the three-headed dragon Azhi Dahaka offers a hundred horses, a thousand oxen, and ten thousand sheep, praying to empty the earth of men, and is refused. Her standing rose sharply in the late Achaemenid period: Artaxerxes II (r. 404-358 BCE) names her beside Ahura Mazda and Mithra in his inscriptions, and classical authors record that he set up her statues in the great cities of the empire. The Sasanians made her a patron of kingship; the family of Ardashir I, founder of the dynasty, served as hereditary priests of the Anahid fire temple at Istakhr, and the great stone platform at Kangavar in western Iran has long been associated with her worship.
