Persian kings invited Ahura Mazda to battle in an empty chariot
At the Achaemenid court, the supreme god of Zoroastrianism had no statue. Instead an empty chariot pulled by white horses rolled out with the army, inviting Ahura Mazda to ride along into war. His name means Lord Wisdom, and he may be older than Zoroaster himself.
Ahura means lord and Mazda means wisdom. Linguists trace Ahura to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to beget, making it a cousin of Sanskrit asura and of a Germanic word for a god. Mazda descends from an ancient compound meaning roughly placing one's mind, so wise, and matches the Vedic word for intelligence. Old Persian inscriptions write the name Auramazda, and later forms include Ohrmazd and Ormazd.
The first major royal invocation comes in Darius the Great's Behistun Inscription, during the Achaemenid period of about 550 to 330 BC. Every surviving royal inscription honours him alone until Artaxerxes II, who reigned from about 404 to 358 BC and grouped him with Mithra and Anahita. Images of the god appear from the fifth century BC, but the Sasanian dynasty backed an iconoclastic movement that swapped them for carved stone figures and finally removed them.
Some historians believe his worship predates the prophet. R. C. Zaehner linked the earlier Ahura Mazda with truth or cosmic order, and with water, light or the sun. Emile Benveniste argued that Zoroastrians adopted an existing deity, and that Achaemenid inscriptions contain nothing specifically Zoroastrian. In Mazdaism, which developed in eastern Iran and Central Asia, Ahura Mazda is merely one god, on a par with Mithra.
In Zoroastrian tradition, the prophet at 30 went to fetch water at dawn for a ritual and met a radiant being, Vohu Manah, who brought him before Ahura Mazda to learn the Good Religion. Zoroaster taught that Ahura Mazda made helper spirits called yazatas, that certain Iranian gods were demons fashioned by the destructive spirit Angra Mainyu, and that humans help in the cosmic struggle. Ahura Mazda is Angra Mainyu's superior rather than his equal, and evil will lose.
Source: Ahura Mazda
