Sometimes Ahura-mazda is himself included among the Amesha-spentas, thus bringing their number up to seven; sometimes his place is taken by a certain Sraosha (obedience to the law), the first who offered sacrifice and recited the prayers of the ritual.  Subordinate to these great spirits were the Yazatas, scattered by thousands over creation, presiding over the machinery of nature and maintaining it in working order.  Most of them received no special names, but many exercised wide authority, and several were accredited by the people with an influence not less than that of the greater deities themselves.  Such Were the regent of the stars—­Tishtrya, the bull with golden horns, Sirius, the sparkling one; Mao, the moon-god; the wind, Vato; the atmosphere, Vayu, the strongest of the strong, the warrior with golden armour, who gathers the storm and hurls it against the demon; Atar, fire under its principal forms, divine fire, sacred fire, and earthly fire; Vere-thraghna, the author of war and giver of victory; Aurva-taspa, the son of the waters, the lightning born among the clouds; and lastly, the spirit of the dawn, the watchful Mithra, “who, first of the celestial Yazatas, soars above Mount Hara,* before the immortal sun with his swift steeds, who, first in golden splendour, passes over the beautiful mountains and casts his glance benign on the dwellings of the Aryans."**

* Hara is Haroberezaiti, or Elburz, the mountain over which the sun rises, “around which many a star revolves, where there is neither night nor darkness, no wind of cold or heat, no sickness leading to a thousand kinds of death, nor infection caused by the Daovas, and whose summit is never reached by the clouds.”

     ** This is the Mithra whose religion became so powerful in
     Alexandrian and Roman times.  His sphere of action is defined
     in the Bundehesh.

Mithra was a charming youth of beautiful countenance, his head surrounded with a radiant halo.  The nymph Anahita was adored under the form of one of the incarnations of the Babylonian goddess Mylitta, a youthful and slender female, with well-developed breasts and broad hips, sometimes represented clothed in furs and sometimes nude.* Like the foreign goddess to whom she was assimilated, she was the dispenser of fertility and of love; the heroes of antiquity, and even Ahura-mazda himself, had vied with one another in their worship of her, and she had lavished her favours freely on all.**

     * The popularity of these two deities was already well
     established at the period we are dealing with, for Herodotus
     mentions Mithra and confuses him with Anahita.

     ** Her name Ardvi-Sura Anahita seems to signify the lofty
     and immaculate power.

The less important Yazatas were hardly to be distinguished from the innumerable multitude of Fravashis.  The Fravasliis are the divine types of all intelligent beings.  They were originally brought into being by Ahura-mazda as a distinct species from the human, but they had allowed themselves to be entangled in matter, and to be fettered in the bodies of men, in order to hasten the final destruction of the demons and the advent of the reign of good.*