MAXIMS OF THE MAGIAN RELIGION.

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Magian doctrines, with the fire worship and open honor of the Sun and heavenly bodies, were established in the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires, and among other people of the East, long before the foundation of the Persian Empire. Zoroaster was only a restorer, or reformer, who regulated its ceremonies and gave laws to its ministers. He established the Pyrea-temples where the sacred fire was preserved.

The destruction of Ahriman (the principle of evil, darkness, ignorance, disorder) being impossible, say the Parsees, there remained only to take from him his influeuce over the creatures whom he besieged, and to fortify them against his attacks. Such is the object of the law brought by Zoroaster, the expression of the word of Ormusd.

The first Apostle of this law was Hom, a celebrated personage, who presided over the distribution of the waters and instructed the animals. He taught men to celebrate the Ferouers,* for whom the world has been produced. His principal occupation, say

the Parsees, is still to practise the ceremonies of the law.

You are the first, O great Hom, says Zoroaster, to whom Ormusd has given the Evanguin and the Saddere, useful garments sent from heaven, with the pure law of the Mazdeiesnans. Having girded the Evanguin on high ranges of mountains, you announced the word upon the mountains. Hom, chief of places, chief of streets, chief of cities, chief of provinces.

Zoroaster then teaches that Hom was the first priest of the law which he announces, and that this law was from the beginning practised in Heaven, whence the same Hom received its destructive symbols, the girdle Evanguin, and a species of shirt called Saddere.

But it seems that in the time of Hom, the law had not that apparatus of ceremonies which afterwards accompanied it, and that but few persons followed it.

This induced Ormusd to propose it anew to Djemschid, a son granted to the prayers which Vivengham, his father, had addressed to Hom. The pure Djemschid, says Ormusd, chief of the people and of herds, O holy Zoroaster, is the first man who has consulted me, who am Ormusd, as thou dost, O Zoroaster.

I said to him in the beginning, I, who am Ormusd, submit to my

* The Ferouers are the spiritual principles, divine ideas, and first models of beings.

law pure Djem, son of Vivengham. Meditate it, bear it to your people. But the pure Djem answered me, O Zoroaster, I am not just enough to practise thy law, to meditate on it and to bear it to Then I said to him, I who am Ormusd, O Zoroaster, if Djem cannot practise my law, meditate it and bear it to men, at least let him render happy the world which belongs to me, let him render my world fertile and abundant, let him care for it and govern it.

men.

The establish

Djemschid consented, on condition that under his reign death and evil should disappear from the world, and Ormusd granted this. This prince practised the substance of the law. Instructed by Hom, he ordered the girdle called Kosti to be worn. ment of six feasts, called Gahanbars, is attributed to him. He paid special respect to fire. And the simple law, which recognized one supreme being and two subordinate principles, and whose few feasts and ceremonies recalled the origin and arrangement of the universe, is what is called Poeriodekesch, signifying first law, and its followers, the men of the first law. It sufficed to the favorites of Ormusd. The Ferouers, says Zoroaster of the Poeriodeschans, or men of the first age, who have been instructed by the ear, these pure ones whose bodies and souls have been submitted to the law, are in the abodes of the saints. I make them izeschne (religious salutation.) Custom had continued, this religion, though not without alterations, to the reign of Gustasp. The fire worship remounted to that of Djemschid, whom, the Boun Dehesh tells us, raised altars to this element. Ke Khosro had the same respect for this element. But there were few Atescgahs or places of fire in Persia before the time of Zoroaster. Its adoration was not an act of necessity, and men not being restrained by fixed externals of religion founded on practices which continually recalled to them the Supreme Being, allied the worship of the first principle with that of the stars, the elements, and evil genii. Some had even substituted the worship of stars for that of the Supreme Being, or adored simply the Dews and idols.

To remedy these abuses, Zoroaster proposed as obligatory the ceremonies before practised freely and sanctioned by custom.

He collected at the same time the doctrines and customs preserved by tradition, those which he held from his Chaldean masters, and those which he believed or pretended to have been communicated to him personally by Hom. This body of doctrine, accompanied by a morality founded in reason and sustained by a pompous apparatus of ceremonies relative to the theological system of Zoroaster, forms the

FIRE WORSHIP PRINCIPLES.

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religion of the Parsees, taught in the Zend, Pehlvic and Parse ebooks. It is reducible to two points. The first is to recognize and adore the master of all good, the principle of all justice, Ormusd, according to the religious creed which he has prescribed, and with purity of thought, word, and action; a purity, represented and sustained by that of the body, which must always accompany it, and which is found only in entire submission to the law of Zoroaster. In the second place, a grateful respect for the intelligences which Ormusd has entrusted with the care of nature; to take their attributes as models of our action; to repeat in our conduct the harmony which reigns amongst the different parts of the universe; and generally, to honor Ormusd in all that he has produced, according to these words of the izeschne: "Ormusd says expressly that he renders great him who is pure; that is, who is careful to respect Ormusd and the people of whom he has thought in the beginning, to respect all the great, to respect this excellent people who live purely like Ormusd." What is pure action? It is to invoke with respect the numerous people who have been created in the beginning.

The second point of the religion established by Zoroaster is to detest the author of all physical and moral evil, Ahriman, his productions, his works; and to contribute as much as we can to give lustre to the glory of Ormusd, by weakening the tyranny which the bad principle exerts over the world which the good principle has created.*

*Thus it appears that the Magians have appreciated as clearly as any of the Christians how works are implied in faith, and objective virtue in the subjective spirit or disposition to virtue, and they recognized it as the legitimate aim of their doctrines and religious ceremonies to cultivate this subjective principle of virtue by teaching the mind to dwell upon divine and heroic perfections. Reverence is the fountain of heroic virtue.

Their love and service of all that is noble, true, and good, and their resistance and abhorrence of the evil, mean, and false, are animated by the personal consciousness with which they regard these prirciples as the characters of Ormusd and of Ahriman. The relation in which man is brought towards God is eminently friendly, co-operative, almost familiar.—Ormusd speaks of Zoroaster and other human beings, as of persons or souls for whom he entertains a cordial respect.

The doctrine is a natural corrollary on the conception that God is the substance or internal life of man, who has no existence save as a form or manifestation of the creative life. After this, whether we incline to the common notion of individual responsibility, which blames and praises Abraham, Saul, or David, according to the power and virtue it finds in them; or to the rational conception, that as the sphere so is the life that comes to fill it, recognizing

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PRINCIPLES OF THE MAGIAN RELIGION.

To these two points relate the prayers, the religious practices, the civil customs, and the moral precepts presented by the Zend, Pehlvic and Parsee books.

every man as the concrete organic history of his ancestors, presented under certain modifications of climate, environment, nurture, and education; we find it equally simple that the divine creative life should congratulate and esteem itself in proportion to the appropriateness and harmonious integrity of the mould or organism prepared for it in Abraham, Saul, David, or others. The sensation of pain or pleasure we feel in our lives, is precisely in ratio to the chance of manifestation which their internal divinity obtains.

The pure and excellent people created at the beginning are, as we shall see farther on, not mere mortal creatures, but the spiritual principles of nature, to whom are referred the order and harmonies which exist in the elementary, mineral, vegetable, and animal spheres. The force of these precepts consists in the sentiment of essential or spiritual beings, as the internal realities of all those physical forms and forces which otherwise impose on us through our senses the tyranny of a dead, unintelligent, unfeeling materialism. The Magian theology endeavored, with more or less success, to lead men to their happiness, by attaching to the observance of natural laws and harmonies the force of the moral and religious sentiment, to establish in the human mind the conscious identity of the laws of nature with the wills of God.

THEOLOGY-GENERAL VIEW.

ZOROASTER teaches that there is one first principle, infinite and eternal-Boundless Time. "In the greatness of time," he says, "there was no being who could call it creator, since none had yet been created. Then it created fire and water, and from their mixture, or when they had been created, proceeded Ormusd. Time was the creator, and preserved its empire over the creatures which it had produced.* In Boundless Time there is no distinction of good and evil, of just and unjust. In it all nature is stable or essential, and whatever forms its substance assumes in beings of the second or third order, it will always be the centre of perfection.†

* This, translated from mystical into scientific phrase, means simply that all beings are subject to a law of organic periodicity, their appearance or birth depending on the preparations of the sphere or place and medium which they enter, and all the phenomena of their life being subject to a law of organic periodicity, which gives the varying characters of their formation or birth, growth, maturity, decline, and death, disintegration or transformation.

Fire and water correspond to the oxygen and hydrogen principles-the oxygen principles are supporters of combustion, and of the transformation of tissueseither living or dead, which is an act of slow combustion; the hydrogen principles are combustibles, or bodies undergoing combustion and transformation. So in the vital organisms, to which hydrogen and water are always essential elements, we have the contrasted states and functions of activity and of nutrition, of Doing and of Being, of Expression and Reception, which are terms equally true of our physical and of our spiritual life.

+ ILLUSTRATIONS.-If the erection of a building be considered as an act relative to the all-creative Time, we observe a natural division of two forms or directions of movement; first, in excavating the foundation, preparing the wood and stone materials, &c., we have an apparently confused and destructive processholes dug―trees rooted up and sawn or to cut pieces, &c., a process strikingly contrasted with the subsequent operations of adjustment which present more and more as they advance the order and beauty of architectural symmetry and adaptation to our uses and pleasures. Yet the analytic or destructive, equally with the synthetic part of this dual action, was necessary to the end attained; both equally essential and perfect in respect to the common Time which encloses them. It is the same with a plant whose dual movement consists, first, in