Drawn by
Faucher-Gudin;
coin of King
Huvishka,
Mithra was a charming youth of beautiful countenance, his head surrounded with a radiant halo. The nymph Anâhita 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-mazdâ 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 Anâhita.
** Her name Ardvî-Sûra Anâhita 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-mazdâ 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.*
* The legend of the descent of the Fravashis to dwell among
men is narrated in the Bundehesh.
Drawn by Faucher-
Gudin, from Loftus