[Mehrbod]

Airyaman
aka: Erman

An ancient Persian divinity and a yazata of the Zoroastrian pantheon, known in Manichean Middle Persian as Aryaman, in Pahlavi as Ērmān. The Avestan common noun airyaman-, Vedic aryaman-, means “friend, companion;” and the Indo-Iranian Aryaman was, it seems, the hypostasis of friendship, and of friendly alliance; and this being ratified at times by a formal oath, he was close ...
to the asuras Mitra and Varuna, who upheld oath and covenant. In the Vedas he appears as one of the group of Ādityas; and with Varuna (under his by-name of Bhaga) he presided over marriage, presumably as the sealing of the bond of friendship between two families.

In Iran Airyaman exercised this same function, and he is accordingly still regularly invoked at Zoroastrian weddings. Moreover, the Middle Persian proper name Bay-Aryāmān attests that in Iran too he was linked with Varuna, the Baga (q.v.). In Zoroastrianism, however, he has also an eschatological role; for it is he, according to the Pahlavi books, who will guide the Saošyant, Astvaṱ.ərəta, when he comes to bring about Frašō.kərəti (see Frašegerd). Just why this role should be assigned to the yazata of Friendship remains a matter for speculation, but conceivably it was because Frašō.kərəti will see the end of all enmity and strife. Thereafter, “Fire and Ērmān Yazd will melt the metal in the hills and mountains, and it will be upon the earth like a river” (Bd. 34.18); this river will burn away all wickedness and purify the whole physical creation. Airyaman is thus actively associated with the achievement of Frašō.kərəti, which for Zoroaster and his early followers was an event not far off, and which all Zoroastrians have ardently expected. It is presumably for this reason that Airyaman is addressed, in the great Gathic prayer called after him, as Airyə̄mā īšyō “Longed-for Airyaman.”

Airyaman further became for Zoroastrians a yazata of healing, able not only to heal physical evil in the future, but to cure any of the 99,999 present illnesses sent by Angra Mainyu to plague mankind (see Vd. 22.7-24). So it is said in the Bundahišn, with a direct Pahlavi rendering of a lost Avestan passage: “The Amahraspand Ērmān is that divinity who has given healing to created beings for all ills. As He says: "All the drugs which created beings consume for the ending of sickness—if I, Ohrmazd, had not created Ērmān for healing, that sickness would not (thereby) be cured"