The Cult
Anāhitā’s cult is unusually well documented for an Iranian goddess, because Greeks, Romans, and Armenians all wrote about it. Her liturgy is the Ābān Yašt itself, still recited for the waters, and the hymn’s rubrics make lustration the price of audience — no sacrifice without purification first. Strabo describes how the sons of Armenia’s greatest families were consecrated to Anaitis as temple servants, and Tacitus records a temple of the ‘Persian Diana’ at Hierocaesarea in Lydia tended according to the institutions of the Magi. Under the Achaemenids and again under the Sasanians the state itself was the votary: royal inscriptions invoke her between Ahura Mazdā and Mithra, and the roster of great sanctuary fires included Ādur-Anāhīd. The Armenian historians remember her golden temple at Erznka, served by priests on royal endowment. What survives materially is the architecture of patronage — Kangāvar, Bīšāpūr, Takht-e Soleymān — rather than votive clutter; the relic of this cult is the temple, not the offering pile.