The Wise Lord and the Choice at the Heart of the World

Ahura Mazda is represented in Zoroastrian practice not by any image but by fire, and the tradition maintains three grades of consecrated fire, from a simple household flame up to the Atash Behram, the highest grade, whose consecration draws together sixteen different fires gathered from different trades and purified through repeated ritual transfer before they are fused into one. The Atash Behram at Yazd in Iran and the Iranshah at Udvada in Gujarat, established after Zoroastrian refugees migrated from Iran to India in the early medieval period, are tradition's oldest continuously tended fires, each said in tradition to have burned without interruption for well over a thousand years, and Udvada in particular remains the spiritual centre of the Parsi community.

The winged disc carved above the king in Achaemenid royal reliefs at Persepolis and elsewhere is popularly read as an image of Ahura Mazda, though scholars dispute the identification; it may equally represent the king's own khvarenah, or divine glory, and Zoroastrianism's own aniconism makes any pictorial reading uncertain. What is not disputed is Ahura Mazda's place in Achaemenid royal ideology: Darius I opens his great inscription at Bisotun by naming Ahura Mazda as the god who gave him the kingship, and later Achaemenid kings repeat the formula, tying the god of cosmic truth directly to the legitimacy of Persian rule centuries before the Gathas were written down.