** This is the Mithra whose religion became so powerful in
Alexandrian and Roman times. His sphere of action is defined
in the Bundehesh.

Mithra was a charming youth of beautiful countenance, his head
surrounded with a radiant halo. The nymph Anâhita was adored under the
form of one of the incarnations of the Babylonian goddess Mylitta, a
youthful and slender female, with well-developed breasts and broad hips,
sometimes represented clothed in furs and sometimes nude.* Like the
foreign goddess to whom she was assimilated, she was the dispenser of
fertility and of love; the heroes of antiquity, and even Ahura-mazdâ
himself, had vied with one another in their worship of her, and she had
lavished her favours freely on all.**

* The popularity of these two deities was already well
established at the period we are dealing with, for Herodotus
mentions Mithra and confuses him with Anâhita.

** Her name Ardvî-Sûra Anâhita seems to signify _the lofty
and immaculate power_.

The less important Yazatas were hardly to be distinguished from the
innumerable multitude of Fravashis. The Fravasliis are the divine types
of all intelligent beings. They were originally brought into being by
Ahura-mazdâ as a distinct species from the human, but they had allowed
themselves to be entangled in matter, and to be fettered in the bodies
of men, in order to hasten the final destruction of the demons and the
advent of the reign of good.*