Ahura Mazda

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.

Under the Sasanian empire, from the third to the seventh century CE, Zoroastrianism became the state religion of Iran, and Ahura Mazda's cult was administered by a powerful priesthood, the magi, with fire temples endowed across the empire; Sasanian kings styled themselves as ruling by the grace of Ohrmazd. Within that same period a minority current called Zurvanism reworked the cosmology further, making Zurvan, personified Time, the father of both Ohrmazd and his adversary Ahriman as twin sons, a scheme the Gathas themselves do not contain and that mainstream Zoroastrian theology has generally rejected as a distortion of the god's uncreated primacy.

The winged figure now widely used as an emblem of Zoroastrianism, called the Faravahar, derives from the same disputed Achaemenid winged-disc imagery and was revived as a popular religious and national symbol mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, worn and displayed by Parsis and Iranian Zoroastrians alike, though its ancient meaning, whether fravashi, guardian spirit, royal glory, or the god himself, remains an open question rather than settled doctrine. The Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century ended Zoroastrianism's status as a state religion and began the long migration and contraction that left the faith today a minority tradition, but Ahura Mazda remains, in both Iran and the diaspora, worshipped as the one uncreated Lord before the living flame.