II. Persia. off to the idolatry of their neighbours, or intro- CHAP. ducing foreign rites into their own religious system, not merely offended against the great primal distinction of their faith, the unity of the godhead, but sunk from the pure, humane, and comparatively civilised institutes of their lawgiver, to the loose and sanguinary usages of barbarism. In the Religion of East, however, they encountered a religion of a far nobler and more regular structure *: a religion which offered no temptation to idolatrous practices; for the Magian rejected, with the devout abhorrence of the followers of Moses, the exhibition of the Deity in the human form; though it possessed a rich store of mythological and symbolical figures, singularly analogous to those which may be considered the poetic machinery of the later Hebrew prophets.† The religion of Persia seems to have held an intermediate rank between the Pantheism of India, where the whole universe emanated from the Deity, and was finally to be reabsorbed into the Deity, and the purer Theism of the Jews, which asserted the one omnific Jehovah, and seemed to place a wide and impassable interval between the CHAP. II. nature of the Creator and that of the created being. In the Persian system, the Creation owed its existence to the conflicting powers of evil and good. These were subordinate to, or proceeding from, the Great Primal Cause (Zeruane Akerene), Time without bounds*, which in fact appears, as Gibbon observes, rather as a metaphysical abstraction, than as an active and presiding deity. The Creation was at once the work and the dominion of the two antagonist creators, who had balanced against each other in perpetual conflict a race of spiritual and material beings, light and darkness, good and evil. This Magianism, subsequent to the Jewish Captivityt, and during the residence of the captives in Mesopotamia, either spread with the conquests of the Persians, from the regions farther to the east, Aderbijan and Bactria, or was first promulgated by Zoroaster, who is differently represented as the author or as the reformer of the faith. From the remarkable allusions or points of coincidence between some of the Magian tenets and the Sacred Writings, Hyde and Prideaux laboured to prove that Zoroasters had been a pupil of Daniel, and de So translated by Du Perron and Kleuker. There is a learned dissertation of Foucher on this subject. Acad. des Ins. vol. xxix. According to Bohlen it is analogous to the Sanskrit Sarvam akaranam, the Uncreated Whole; according to Fred. Schlegel, Sarvam akharyam, the Unum Indivisibile. The appearance of the Magian order, before the conquest of Babylon by the Medo-Persian Kings, is an extremely difficult question. Nebuchadnezzar's army was attended (Jer. xxxix. 3.) by Nergal-sharezer, the Rab-mag, (Archimagus). Compare Bertholdt, Daniel Excurs. iii, רב מג Isaiah, xlvii, 7. The name of Zoroaster (Zerotoash), has been deduced from words signifying "the star of gold," or" the star of splendour," and may have been a title or appellative. CHAP. II. ness of rived those notions, which seem more nearly allied to the purer Jewish faith, from his intercourse with the Hebrew prophet, who held a high station under the victorious Medo-Persian monarchy.* But, Completein fact, there is such an originality and complete- Zoroastrian ness in the Zoroastrian system, and in its leading system. principles, especially that of the antagonist powers of good and evil, it departs so widely from the ancient and simple Theism of the Jews, as clearly to indicate an independent and peculiar source, at least in its more perfect development; if it is not, as we are inclined to believe, of much more ancient date, and native to a region much further to the east than the Persian court, where Zoroaster, according to one tradition, might have had intercourse, in his youth, with the prophet Daniel. If, as appears to be the general opinion of the con- The Zendatinental writers, who have most profoundly investi- vesta. gated the subject, we have authentic remains, or at *The hypothesis which places Zoroaster under the reign of Darius Hystaspes, identified with the Gushtasp of Persian mythological history, is maintained by Hyde, Prideaux, Anquetil du Perron, Kleuker, Herder, Goerres, Malcolm, Von Hammer, and apparently by De Guignaut. The silence of Herodotus appears to me among the strongest objections to this view. Foucher, Tychsen, Heeren, and recently Holty, identify Gushtasp with Cyaxares I., and place the religious revolution under the previous Median dynasty. A theory which throws Zoroaster much higher up into antiquity is developed with great ability by Rhode, in his Heilige Sage. The earlier date of the Persian These views may in some degree The elements of the Gesenius on Isaiah, lxv. 5. Con- II. CHAP. least records which, if of later date, contain the true principles of Magianism, in the Liturgies and Institutes of the Zendavesta *; it is by no means an * It may be necessary, in this country, briefly to state the question as to the authenticity or value of these documents. They were brought from the East by that singular adventurer, Anquetil du Perron. Sir W. Jones, in a letter, not the most successful of the writings of that excellent and accomplished man, being a somewhat stiff and laboured imitation of the easy irony of Voltaire, threw a shade of suspicion over the character of Du Perron, which in England has never been dispelled, and, except among Oriental scholars, has attached to all his publications. Abroad, however, the antiquity of the Zendavesta, at least its value as a trustworthy record of the Zoroastrian tenets, has been generally acknowledged. If altogether spurious, those works must be considered as forgeries of Du Perron. But, I., they are too incomplete and imperfect, for forgeries; if it had been worth Du Perron's while to fabricate the Institutes of Zoroaster, we should, no doubt, have had something more elaborate than several books of prayers, and treatises of different ages, from which it required his own industry, and that of his German translator, Kleuker, to form a complete system. II. Du Perron must have forged the language in which the books are written, as well as the books themselves. But the Zend is universally admitted by the great Orientalists and historians of language to be a genuine and very curious branch of the Eastern dialects. (See Bopp. Vergleichende Grammatik.) It should be added, that the publication of the Zendavesta, in the original, has been commenced by M. Bournouf in Paris, and by M. Olshausen in Ger many. III. These documents may be considered as more modern compilations, of little greater authority than the Sadder, which Hyde translated from the modern Persian. That they are of the age of Zoroaster, it may be difficult to prove; but their internal evidence, and their coincidence with the other notices of the Persian religion, scattered among the writings of the Greeks and Romans (see du Perron's and Kleuker's illustrations, especially the Persica of the latter), afford sufficient ground for supposing that they contain the genuine and unadulterated elements of the Zoroastrian faith, and, if not of primitive, are of very high antiquity. The traces of Mahometanism, which Brucker (vol. vi. p. 68.) supposed that he had detected, and which are apparent in the Sadder, are rather notions borrowed by Mahomet from the Jews; but whence obtained by the Jews, is the question. Mr. Erskine, the highest authority on such subjects, considers the existing Zendavesta to have been compiled in the age of Ardeshir Babhegan, the great restorer of the Magian faith. (Bombay Transactions.) In Professor Neuman's translation of Vartan there is a curious sentence, which seems to intimate that the books of the Magian faith either did not exist at that time, or were inaccessible to the generality. IV. A thought has sometimes crossed my own mind (it has been anticipated by Du Perron), whether they can be the sacred books of a sect formed from an union of Gnos improbable source in which we might discover the origin of those traditional notions of the Jews, which were extraneous to their earlier system, and which do not appear to rest on their sacred records. It is undoubtedly remarkable, that among the Magian tenets, we find so many of those doctrines, about which the great schism in the Jewish popular creed, that of the traditionists and antitraditionists, contended for several centuries. It has already been observed, that in the later prophetic writings, many allusions and much of what may be called the poetic language and machinery, is strikingly similar to the main principles of the Magian faith. Nor can it be necessary to suggest how completely such expressions as the "children of light," and the "children of darkness," had become identified with the common language of the Jews, at the time of our Saviour: and when Jesus proclaimed himself " the Light of the world,” no doubt he employed a term familiar to the ears of the people, though, as usual, they might not tic or appeal to the Zendavesta as au- * Mosheim has traced with II. |
