Around Ahura Mazda stood the Amesha Spentas, the seven Holy Immortals, who were the principles by which he had created and now sustained the world. They were not separate gods in the older sense — gods with their own histories, their own marriages, their own conflicts — but personified aspects of the Wise Lord's own nature, modes of his creative activity, the seven facets through which the divine acted in the cosmos. Each of them was assigned a special domain among the seven created things — the sky, the waters, the earth, the plants, the cattle, humankind, and fire — and each was to be honored on a particular day of the month, in a particular season of the year, and through a particular virtue of the human life.
The seven were Vohu Manah, the Good Mind, who presided over the cattle; Asha Vahishta, the Best Truth, who presided over fire; Khshathra Vairya, the Ideal Dominion, who presided over metals; Spenta Armaiti, the Holy Devotion, who presided over the earth; Haurvatat, the Wholeness, who presided over the waters; Ameretat, the Immortality, who presided over the plants; and the Holy Spirit himself, Spenta Mainyu, who presided over humankind. Together they completed the heptad through which the world was made and kept.
Their festivals — the Gahanbars — divided the year into six (later seven) seasons, each one celebrated as the anniversary of the creation of one of the seven created things. Their virtues — good thought, true speech, just action, devout love of the earth, wholeness of body, life everlasting — were to be cultivated by every worshipper as the proper response to the Holy Immortals' patronage. The Zoroastrian was not just to invoke the Amesha Spentas in his prayers but to become like them, to embody in his own conduct the virtues they were.
The doctrine had immense influence beyond Iran. The Jewish angelology of the post-exilic period, with its named archangels (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, and the rest), shows clear marks of Iranian influence; the seven archangels of Christian tradition descend through this Jewish development from the seven Amesha Spentas of the Avestan original. The doctrine of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit in Christian theology, the seven virtues of medieval moral psychology, even the seven planets of the Hermetic-Hellenistic cosmology — all bear some inherited debt to the Iranian conception.
