Twelve spirit beings Zarathustra called the sons of Ormuzd, each carrying the light activity of one zodiac sign into earthly life.
The Amshaspands in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term for the twelve subservient spirit beings whom Zarathustra named the sons and servants of Ormuzd, each one charged with the light activity streaming from a single sign of the zodiac. Steiner set them out in his Berlin lecture of 19 January 1911, published in German as part of GA 60 and in English as Turning Points in Spiritual History. Ormuzd holds the whole activity of the realm of light; the Amshaspands hold its specialised directions. Six or seven of them work on the side of Ormuzd from the bright signs, and five or six work on the side of Ahriman from the signs lying in gloom, so the same twelvefold ring carries both blessing and hindrance. Steiner also read them anatomically, matching the twelve currents to the twelve pairs of cranial nerves in the human head.
The Amshaspands stand one rank below Ormuzd, the spirit of light, in the cosmology Steiner reconstructed from Zarathustra. Where Ormuzd radiates through the whole zodiacal circle, each Amshaspand governs one direction of that radiance, the light falling from Aries, from Taurus, from Cancer. Zarathustra read their work in the sky the way a reader reads letters on a page.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus, for Zarathustra, the effects of Ormuzd from the different directions, symbolized by the position of the sun in the different constellations, that is, the different directions of Ormuzd's effects, are expressed by those spiritual beings who are, as it were, the servants, the sons of Ormuzd, who carry out what he commands: these are the “Amshaspands” or “Amesha-Spentas,” who are, as it were, subordinate to Ormuzd and have their own special activities. While Ormuzd has the entire activity of the realm of light, the Amshaspands have the special activities that are expressed by the shining of the sun from Aries, Taurus, Cancer, and so on.
What it Means Today
Anyone who carries Steiner's twelve Amshaspands into a university library meets a different number straight away. Mary Boyce, Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, set the modern scholarly account in Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1979, and in the first volume of her History of Zoroastrianism for Brill in 1975. In Boyce's reading the Amesha Spentas number six, each paired with one of the seven creations: Vohu Manah with cattle, Asha Vahishta with fire, Khshathra Vairya with metal and sky, Spenta Armaiti with earth, Haurvatat with water, Ameretat with plants. Ahura Mazda himself, through his bounteous spirit Spenta Mainyu, completes the seven. Nothing in the Gathas counts twelve, and nothing there sorts the Immortals into bright and dark halves.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner is not correcting Boyce's philology, he is reading a second register, and the honest way to hold both accounts together is to say that the six-creation scheme maps the Amesha Spentas onto substance while Steiner's twelve maps them onto direction. Cattle, fire, metal, earth, water and plants answer what the light makes; Aries, Taurus and Cancer answer where it comes from. Watch the swing of light across a single year, noticing how differently the sun works in January and in June, and you track what Zarathustra tracked. Steiner's further claim, made in the same Berlin hour, is that those twelve directions are printed into the body as the twelve pairs of cranial nerves, so the ring overhead and the ring in the skull are one reading at two scales.
Where to Read More
- Turning Points in Spiritual History, GA 60
- Find at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]