The Izeds are the Zarathustran spirit-ranks standing below the Amshaspands, usually counted as twenty-eight, whose forces work into the animal kingdom and the lower soul-life.
The Izeds in Anthroposophy is the name Rudolf Steiner used for the order of Zarathustran spiritual beings standing one step below the Amshaspands and one step above the Ferruhars or Fravashis. Steiner set out this three-tier picture in his lecture Zarathustra, given in Berlin on 19 January 1911 and collected in Turning Points in Spiritual History (GA 60). Where the twelve Amshaspands govern the forces carried by light through the zodiac, the Izeds govern the forces that work into the animal kingdom and into what Steiner called the lower soul-life of the human being. Their number is deliberately unsettled: twenty-eight is the usual count, though the tradition gives figures from twenty-four up to thirty-one. Steiner matched that count to the twenty-eight pairs of spinal nerves, reading human anatomy as the condensed trace of a cosmic hierarchy. The Avestan word behind Ized is yazata, a being worthy of worship.
The Izeds occupy the middle floor of Zarathustra’s spiritual architecture. Above them stand twelve Amshaspands who carry the light of the zodiac; below them the Ferruhars, who guide the group-souls of animals. The Izeds themselves are servants, numerous and hard to count, and the sphere they touch is the animal nature that human beings carry inside their own bodies.
In Steiner’s Own Words
From the above it is apparent that the conception which Goethe formed of ‘God’s sons’ as the servants of the Highest Divine Power, is similar to Zarathustra’s concept concerning the Amschaspands, of which, as already stated, he recognized twelve different kinds. Again, subservient to these Amschaspand entities, according to Zarathustranism, are yet lower orders of spiritual powers or forces, among which some twenty-eight separate types are usually distinguished. These are the so-called ‘Izarads’ or ‘Izeds’; the number of different classes into which they may be divided is, however, indeterminate, being variously estimated from twenty-four up to twenty-eight, and even as high as thirty-one.
What it Means Today
Steiner’s floating count, twenty-four to thirty-one, is not vagueness. It is the fingerprint of a calendar. Zoroastrian practice names every one of the thirty days of the month after a divine being, and the Avestan text that lists those dedications is the Siroza, whose title simply means thirty days. Four of the thirty days belong to Ahura Mazda and six to the Amesha Spentas, which leaves the remaining dedications to the yazatas, the beings Steiner transliterates as Izeds. Three further divinities, Apam Napat, Haoma and Dahman Afrin, are treated as extra-calendary and invoked alongside the primary reckoning, so the totals shift depending on who is counting. Mary Boyce (1920 to 2006), Professor of Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, documented this liturgical calendar in Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1979), the book that made the day-name system legible to readers outside the field. Read against the Siroza, Steiner’s twenty-four, twenty-eight, thirty-one is a faithful report of a real dispute inside a living tradition rather than an occultist’s guess.
Thalira synthesis: the Izeds are best understood as a rhythm rather than a roster, which is why their number tracks the lunar month and why their bodily counterpart in Steiner’s reading is the segmented column of spinal nerves rather than any single organ.
Where to Read More
- Turning Points in Spiritual History, GA 60
- Find Turning Points in Spiritual History at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]