Zoroastrianism Armenia

9
mysterious personage who probably wrote in the fifth century, deal with
events of the fourth century and contain many legendary and epic
elements .^
Much of the information on ancient religion supplied by these
early writers, most of whom lived within a century of the invention of
c 22
the Armenian script by St. Mesrop Mastoc (36О-ІЙО), has been supplemented
or corroborated by ethnographic studies conducted in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beginning with the works of
the clergyman and scholar Fr. Garegin Sruanjteanc0 (іВДО-1892). The
latter first recorded recitations of the Armenian national epic of the
heroes of Sasun, one of whom, Mher, is the yazata Mihr, Av. Mithra; the
deeds of the hero Mher, as sung by Armenians in some villages to this
23
day, shed light upon our understanding of the Arm. cult of the yazata.
Another example of the way in which recently recorded traditions can
add to our knowledge of Armenian Zoroastrianism is the legendry of
modem Mus concerning a supernatural creature called the svod or svaz,
whose name appears to be a modern form of that of the sahapet of
2 k
Agathangelos. Modem Armenian folk rituals on the holidays of Ascension
and the Presentation of the Lord to the Temple (Hambar.jum and
Team end ara.j) reveal aspects of the cult of the Ames a Spent as
Haurvatät and Ameretät and of the ancient celebration of the Zoroastrian
feast of Athrakana. In the former case is encountered a frequent
problem of this study:
definition of the specific Iranian origin of
rites or customs which are widespread amongst Indo-European peoples
generally. The custom of young girls gathering spring flowers and
casting them into water is known, for instance, in Russia before Whitsunday.
In such cases we have tried to determine specific Iranian features
in such Armenian customs, be they fire worship, reverence for
trees, or, here, the springtime rite of waters and plants. Thus, an
Iranian form of the rite is recorded for the Sasanian period in the
eleventh-century Kitabu 'I-mahäsin wa ’1-aj.däd:
on each day of the
vernal New Year festival of N5 B5z, virgins stole water for the king,
and he recited a short phrase, corrupt in the Arabic text, which mentions
'the two lucky ones' and 'the two blissful ones'— presumably
Haurvatät and Ameretät. In Armenia, the flowers cast into a vat of
water bear the name of these two divinities: horot-morot. Such