Airyaman Ishya

Zoroastrian tradition sets four short Avestan texts above all others, the Ahuna Vairya, the Ashem Vohu, the Yenghe Hatam and the Airyaman Ishya, and of the four it is the last that is least known outside the community. It is preserved as Yasna 54.1, composed in the same archaic Gathic dialect as the hymns of Zarathushtra himself, and it stands immediately after the final Gatha in the liturgy, closing the oldest stratum of the Avesta. The prayer asks that longed for Airyaman come to the support of the men and women of Zarathushtra's community, to the support of the good mind, and that the ancient promise of reward be fulfilled. Airyaman is the divinity of friendship, community and healing, and his name is cognate with the Vedic god Aryaman, one of the clearest threads connecting the Avestan and Vedic worlds. In the ritual books the prayer carries great weight.

The Vendidad names Airyaman as the healer who answered when the diseases of the world were to be cured, and the liturgical tradition assigns the Airyaman Ishya a place of honour in the Yasna ceremony, where its recitation binds the community's oldest poetry to its continuing worship. The nineteenth century translations of the Yasna in the Sacred Books of the East made the text accessible to scholarship, where it remains central to study of the Gathic corpus.

The Airyaman Ishya lives in two moments of Zoroastrian life, marriage and healing, and in one moment beyond history. At weddings the prayer is recited over the couple, a usage that follows naturally from Airyaman's character as the divinity of friendship, concord and right relationship, so that the community's oldest surviving benediction still opens its marriages. In healing, the tradition remembers Airyaman as the one who cures.

The twenty second chapter of the Vendidad tells how the evil spirit created diseases by the myriad, and how the healing of them was entrusted to Airyaman, whose prayer accordingly carries therapeutic power, recited for the sick alongside practical medicine rather than in place of it. The prayer's furthest horizon is eschatological.

In the Pahlavi tradition of later Zoroastrian literature, the Airyaman Ishya is the prayer whose recitation accompanies the frashokereti, the final renovation of the world, when evil is undone and the living and the risen dead are made whole, the last healing of which every recited cure is a rehearsal. That span, from a wedding canopy to the end of the world, explains the prayer's rank among the four great mantras of the faith, and why Zoroastrian priests still teach it to children in the same dialect in which it was first composed some three thousand years ago.