BAHRAM

I. The Name

The name tells us the entire god before we are told who he is. Avestan Verethragna (𐬬𐬆𐬭𐬆𐬚𐬭𐬀𐬖𐬥𐬀) is a neuter noun made up of vərəθra (“barrier,” “resistance”) and the verbal root gan (“to conquer”), so it literally says “the conquest of resistance.” Therefore, the name is victory itself as a person. In Middle Persian, the name Warahran was shortened to Wahram and eventually to New Persian Bahram, the name by which the deity continues to live today in spoken Iranian^1,2

The Iranian name has a precise equivalent in Indic. Avestan Verethragnan (“victorious”) corresponds to Vedic vṛtrahán (वृत्रहन्, “killer of Vṛtra”), the fixed title of Indra after he broke the serpent that blocked the water, and both come from Proto-Aryan *vṛtraghan. Using this equivalence Émile Benveniste and Louis Renou used in 1934 to argue that there existed a single ancient Indo-Iranian warrior god of the type slaying dragons behind these two names. Paul Thieme agreed with the linguistics of this argument but noted that, although the interpretation of divine names can never be certain, the names were clearly being interpreted as referring to the same warrior god.^1,2,3

The equation is correct, however, it must be limited. Benveniste and Renou demonstrated using other evidence that the main act of Verethragna is not the killing of a dragon since he does not have a story about this anywhere in the Avesta, but rather it is the shattering of every barrier or obstacle and especially the opening of the blocked waters (the most holy of the five elements.) Thus, the god of victory is the essence of triumph as such; he is a concept before he is a character.^1,2,4

Wherever possible, the name followed where the arms of Iran marched as the Parthians knew it as *Warθagn; the Sogdians knew it as Wašaγn; on the gold of the Kushans it appeared as Orlagno; it entered into Armenian as Vahagn; and the Greeks called it Artagnes and placed it next to Herakles. As well, under the Sasanians the same word referred to Mars (the most elevated level of sacred fire); it also referred to six consecutive kings of kings.¹

II. The Bahram Yasht

TThe god has one major hymn and it is very old. The Bahram Yasht, number fourteen of the yahts, is part of the most primitive parts of the Younger Avesta; Arthur Christensen and later Mary Boyce saw much archaic material within its pages as an insight into pre-Zoroastrain thought. James Darmesteter translated it into English for The Sacred Books Of The East in 1883 and separated it into a list of the ten forms taken by Verethragna; a description of the powers given to Zarathuštra through those forms; a description of war magic using the feather of a raven; and finally a final section praising Verethagna.^5,6,4

The strangest gift of the hymn is a talisman. The feather of the vārəgna, the bird of prey that is the god's seventh form, is prescribed as a charm to be carried into war: rubbed over the body and borne against the foe, it turns aside the weapons of enemies and scatters their host in terror (Yt 14.34–46). Victory, in the oldest hymn, is a thing a man may wear and carry.⁵

III. The Ten Incarnations

Vividly perhaps the most defining characteristic of the god is that he does not have a set countenance. The Bahram Yasht begins its description of the ten forms or manifestations of Verethragna as they were shown to Zarathushtra, an ascending list of animal, human and elemental powers. It is difficult to find another similar listing anywhere else in the Avesta. Gherardo Gnoli noted that while there is little similarity in detail between this series and those of the Avatars of Vishnu, and those of Indra in later texts, the two share a general familial resemblance, but not borrowings^5,1

Two of the forms carry a weight beyond their fellows. The seventh, the bird vārəgna, is also the shape in which the royal Glory, the xᵛarənah, takes flight when it abandons an unworthy king, so that the swiftest of birds is at once the god of victory and the fortune of kingship on the wing. The fifth, the boar, is the god at his most ferocious, and it is in this form that Verethragna runs ahead of Mithra in the Mihr Yasht (Yt 10.70), a passage Ilya Gershevitch set at the centre of his study of that hymn.^5,1,7

The boar had the longest afterlife of the ten. Parivash Jamzadeh and, before her, Kurt Erdmann traced the sharp-tusked emblem across Sasanian stucco, silver, textiles, and seals, where it stands for Bahram in his most attacking aspect. The god of victory has no single face because victory itself wears many.^8,9

IV. The Fire of Victory

The Atash Bahram, the "Fire of Victory," is the highest of the three grades of Zoroastrian sacred flame, above the Atash Ādarān and the humble Atash Dādgāh, and its founding is the most elaborate rite in the religion. As Mary Boyce described the consecration, sixteen distinct fires are gathered, among them fire from lightning, fire from the hearths, and fire from the furnaces of the trades, each purified in turn before all are united; the labour occupies many priests across the better part of a year. Once enthroned, the victory-fire is tended without pause and may burn for a thousand years and more. It is the sacred fire par excellence.^10,11

No name was worn by more kings. Touraj Daryaee counts six kings of kings called Bahram across the Sasanian centuries, from the son of Šāpūr I who ruled briefly in the third century to the rebel general Bahram Čōbīn who seized the throne at the century's end and whose by-name, Mehrbandak, "servant of Mithra," bound him to the god who runs beside Verethragna. In later Persian memory the most beloved of them is Bahram V, Bahram Gūr of the hunt, whose exploits fill the Šāhnāma. To be named Victory was to place a reign beneath the god's stylus of the sword.¹²

V. Artagnes, Orlagno, and Vahagn

The God of Victory was too valuable to remain restricted to one region. Eastward, as shown on gold coins of Kushan king Kanishka in the second century CE, he appeared as Orlagno (ΟΡΛΑΓΝΟ), a standing warrior wearing an eagle crested helmet. Scholars like John Rosenfeld note that the winged headpiece resembled that of the Glory (farr) of the Kushans, identical to that which flees as his own bird. Similarly to Kanishka, in eastern regions Sogdians called him Washaγn so wherever Iranian languages were spoken, his name spread outside of Iran. ^13,1

In Armenia he was especially rooted as the Parthian form of his name developed into Vahagn (Վահագն) (the dragon-reaper Vishapakagh Վիշապաքաղ), a god of fire, war and courage for whom Armenian kings would pray while marching. Vahagn's hymn, recorded by Movses Xorenac'i (5th c.), translated by Vyacheslav Ivanov and Robert Thomson, tells of heavenly and earthly travail and a red reed in the purple sea. From this comes a young man with hair of flames and a beard of fire and eyes of two suns. Vahagn's large temple existed at Ashtishat.^18,19

The parallels are tempting, but according to James Russell they need to be carefully evaluated. Vahagn is a native Armenian deity who has taken an Iranian name. He is hardly simply an imported deity carrying foreign garb. Although there are numerous Avestan forms recalling the avataras of Vishnu, none correspond completely.^4,18

VI. The Metaphysics of Victory

The god returns, in the end, to the abstract noun that made him. Verethragna is victory hypostatised. Mary Boyce named him precisely so, the hypostasis of triumph who of old enjoyed the greatest popularity of any yazata. The bare noun keeps its own power apart from the person: in the liturgy the vərəθragna is the weapon of the future Saviour, the Saošyant, in his overcoming of all resistance (Yasna 59.1). Victory in this religion is not one event among many; it is the shape of the whole drama.⁴

The Zoroastrian universe is a struggle between Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, and Angra Mainyu, the destroyer. It is said in this fight Verethragna is fighting on behalf of Asha Vahishta (Best Truth), the force by which order defeats lie. By the time of the later pahlvi texts, Wahram had become an arch-angel and was honored because he drove the adversary back into hell. He is the dynamic of the good creation, the cutting edge of justice.^1,4,22

Aristotle interpreted this dualism as a philosophical idea even before the Neoplatonists did. Aristotle identified the two principles of the magi as Oromasdes and Areimanios in his lost work 'Peri Philosophias' (1.8) as reported by Diogenes Laertius. And in the 'Metaphysics', he placed the magi among those who were precursors of Plato. Joseph Bidez and Franz Cumont collected all of the tradition of what they called the "hellenized magi". Plutarch wrote down the clearest description, placing Oromazes as light and Areimanios as darkness in his 'De Iside et Osiride (46-47)', with mithras situated in between both as mediator/μεσίτης.^21,20

It must be said plainly that the philosophers reached for Mithra and the two principles, and that Verethragna is nowhere named among them. Yet he is the motion the philosophy leaves implicit. The dualism the Greeks admired is a static frame, two principles facing one another across the world; it becomes a drama only when something smites, and vərəθragna is the ancient name of the smiting. Victory is the verb of the Zoroastrian world.^4,20

The Zoroastrian philosophy started to create corruptions, however. The core god that Verethragna came from, Indra, became demonized, a process eventually leading to the demons Royne and Vine.