History of Religion Part 23

Kshathra Vairya (Shahrevar), Perfect Sovereignty; he is the lord of metals.

Spenta Armaiti (Spendarmat) divine piety, conceived as female, the G.o.ddess of the earth.

Haurvatat (Khordat) health.

Ameretat (Amerdat) immortality.

The last two are a pair, and have charge conjointly of waters and of trees.

Ahura is himself one of these spirits; thus there are seven supreme spirits.

Retinue of Ahriman.--Angra Mainyu on his part comes to have a corresponding retinue of six daevas, each being the evil counterpart of one of the good spirits. Evil Mind, Sickness, and Decay are the names of some of them. The whole spiritual world is ranged on the side of the good or of the evil deity. The Izatas (Izeds) or angels consist of G.o.ds of immemorial worship in Iran, some of whom are the same as G.o.ds worshipped in India; but the t.i.tle also applies to G.o.ds, heavenly and earthly, of later creation, so that the cla.s.s is a very wide and elastic one. It comprises some beings who have been reduced by the operation of the new ideas from the first to the second rank of deities, such as Verethragna, who corresponds to the Vedic Indra, and Mithra, the sun-G.o.d. These now appear in the same rank as G.o.ds of the newer style, such as Sraosha, Obedience, and survivals of early superst.i.tion, such as the "Curse of the wise," a very powerful Ized.

Zarathustra himself belongs to this cla.s.s of deities, a miscellaneous one indeed. Another cla.s.s of sacred beings of world-wide extent is that of the Fravashis spoken of above. If the good spirits are many and various, so are the evil. Of these are the great demon-serpent Azhi who plays a great part in Persian mythology, as Vrittra does in Indian. Aeshma, later Asmodeus, may be named; he is one of the Drvants, or storm-fiends. Gahi, an unfaithful G.o.ddess, has fallen to a demon of unchast.i.ty; the Pairikas (Peris) are female tempters; the Yatu are demons connected with sorcery.

The firm organisation of these hosts of spiritual beings, and the sense of a great conflict in which they are all engaged from the greatest to the least of them, preserve Mazdeism from the weakness and absurdity which are apt to creep over religion when the population of the upper and the nether regions is unduly multiplied.

The faithful never forget Ahura in favour of the minor deities, nor do they forget that morals and industry are the chief ends of religion, and that in cultivating these they hasten the coming of the kingdom. The following is the formula, the "Praise of Holiness," with which every act of worship begins in the Yasts[4] (liturgies of the Izeds):

May Ahura Mazda be rejoiced!

Holiness is the best of all good!

I confess myself a worshipper of Mazda, a follower of Zarathustra, one who hates the daevas and obeys the laws of Ahura.

[Footnote 4: _S. B. E._ vol. xxiii.]

Ancient Testimonies to the Persian Religion.--It is at this stage, while it is still in a state of vigour, that we hear of the Persian religion from various quarters in ancient records. The chapters in the latter half of Isaiah, which so vigorously denounce idolatry, hail the approach of Cyrus towards Babylon, and claim unity of religion between him and the Jews (Isaiah xliv. 28 _sq._). He is the shepherd who is to lead Jehovah's people back to their own land, and to cause their temple to be rebuilt. And this claim that the Jewish and the Persian religions were the same, that the Jews and the Persians were alike worshippers of the one true G.o.d, while all the surrounding nations were polytheists and idolaters, was admitted on the side of Persia. After his conquest of Babylon, Cyrus at once permitted the exiles to return to their own land. The Persian monarchs of the following century, Darius and Artaxerxes, continued to take a friendly interest in the worship of Jehovah, whom they apparently regarded as a form of their own G.o.d, "the G.o.d of heaven,"

Hormazd (Ezra vii. 21). They accordingly took measures for the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem, and for the introduction there of the new religious const.i.tution which had been prepared at Babylon.

This could not have happened if the religion of the Persian kings had not been a pure service of one G.o.d,[5] and the other information we have on the subject shows that the Mazdeism of Persia at this period was a very elevated form of the religion. The inscriptions of Darius do not mention the spread of the worships of Mitra and Anahita, which, however, make their appearance in the later inscriptions of Artaxerxes; in none of them is Ahriman spoken of. This, of course, does not prove that he was not believed in; when the Jewish prophet proclaims that Jehovah makes both light and darkness, that he both wounds and heals, there may be a reference to Persian dualism. Yet Mazdeism was capable of appearing, and did appear to the foreigner, as a lofty worship of a G.o.d of light and goodness. The same impression is produced by the descriptions of the Greek writers.

Herodotus (i. 131, 132) writes as follows; he is a contemporary of Ezra: "The following statements as to the customs of the Persians is to be relied on. They do not fashion images of the G.o.ds, nor build temples, nor altars--they consider it wrong to do so, and count it a proof of folly; their reason for this being, as I think, that they do not believe the G.o.ds to be beings of the same nature with men as the Greeks do. They are accustomed to offer sacrifices to Zeus on the summits of mountains; they call the whole circle of heaven Zeus. They sacrifice also to the sun, and the moon, and the earth, and to fire, and to water, and to the winds. These are the ancient parts of their ritual, but they have added the worship of the Queen of heaven, Aphrodite; it was from the a.s.syrians and the Arabs that they acquired this. The a.s.syrian name for Aphrodite is Mylitta, the Arabs call her Alilat, the Persians, Anahita.[6] Such being their G.o.ds the Persians sacrifice to them on this wise. They have no altar, and do not use fire in sacrifice, nor do they have libations nor flutes, nor wreaths nor barley. He who wishes to sacrifice takes his victim to a clean spot and there calls on the deity, his turban wreathed, as a rule, with myrtle. He does not think of praying for benefits for himself individually in connection with his sacrifice; he prays for the welfare of the Persian people and king; he himself is one of the Persian people. He then cuts up the victim, boils the pieces and spreads them out on the softest gra.s.s he can find--if possible, on clover. This done, one of the Magians who has come to a.s.sist, sings a theogony,[7] as they call the accompanying hymn; no sacrifice is allowed to be offered without one of the Magi being present. After a short pause the sacrificer takes up the pieces of flesh and does with them whatever he likes."

[Footnote 5: These two religions, Kuenen says, were more like each other than any other two religions of antiquity.--_Religion of Israel_, iii. 33.]

[Footnote 6: Herodotus says Mitra; but this is a mistake, whether of the father of history or of a transcriber.]

[Footnote 7: One of the Yashts in praise of the particular deity.]

In other pa.s.sages Herodotus tells us of the extreme sanct.i.ty attributed by the Persians to waters, to fire, and to the sun. He also tells us that they regarded lying as the worst possible offence, and next to it falling into debt, since the debtor is tempted to tell lies.

Plutarch writes as follows, quoting from an earlier Greek writer of the third century B.C.: "Zoroaster the Magician,[8] who was 5000 years before the war of Troy, named the good G.o.d Oromazes and the other Arimonius ... Oromazes is engendered of the clearest and purest light, Arimonius of deep darkness; and they war one upon another. The former of these created six other G.o.ds (here follow the Amshaspands), but the latter produceth as many other in number, of adverse operation to the former.... There will come a time when this Arimonius, who brings into the world plague and famine, shall of necessity be rooted out and utterly destroyed for ever ... then shall men be all in happy estate, they shall need no more food, nor cast any shadow from them; and that G.o.d who hath effected all this shall repose himself for a time, and rest in quiet."

[Footnote 8: Holland's translation.]

The Vendidad: Laws of Parity.--These extracts show the growth of certain ideas which we have not noticed before. The dualism is being worked out more in detail, other G.o.ds are coming in, and the doctrine of the sanct.i.ty of the elements has made its appearance. That doctrine is the basis of a new set of ideas and practices which we have now to consider, those namely which are contained in the Vendidad, one of the later works of the Persian canon. To pa.s.s from the Gathas to the Vendidad is like pa.s.sing from Isaiah to Leviticus, and the laws of purity of Persian religion bear a strong a.n.a.logy to those of Judaism. The Vendidad[9] is composed princ.i.p.ally of laws and rules designed to direct the faithful in the great task of maintaining their ritual purity. The whole of life is dominated in this work by the ideas of purity and defilement; the great business of life is to avoid impurity, and when it is contracted to remove it in the correct manner as quickly as possible. Purity here is not primarily sanitary or even moral; though such considerations were no doubt indirectly present. Impure is what belongs to the bad spirit, whether because he created it, as he did certain noxious animals, or because he has established a hold on it as he does on men at death. A man is impure, not because he has exposed himself to the infection of disease, not because he has contracted a stain on his conscience, but because he has touched something of which a Daeva has possession, and so has come under the influence of that Daeva. Purification, therefore, and the act of healing consist of exorcisms of various kinds. This notion of purity plays a great part in other old religions also; it is here that we see its original meaning most clearly. Another great feature of the doctrine of purity in the Vendidad is that the elements, fire, earth, and water, are holy, and to defile them in any way is the most grievous of sins. As everything which leaves the body is unclean, a man must not blow up a fire with his breath, and bathing with a view to cleanliness is not to be thought of. The disposal of the dead was a matter of immense difficulty, since corpses, being unclean, could be committed neither to Fire nor to the Earth. They are ordered to be exposed naked on a building constructed for that purpose on high ground, so that birds of prey may devour them; and a great part of the Vendidad is taken up with directions for purification, after a death has taken place, of the persons who were in the house, of the house itself, of those who carried the corpse, and of the road they travelled, etc.

[Footnote 9: _S. B. E._ vol. iv.]

How this Doctrine Entered Mazdeism.--This system was not in force in the time of Darius and Artaxerxes (when the dead were buried or, as in the case of Croesus, burned) though the ideas were appearing at that period on which it is founded; and it is plain that it has no necessary or vital connection with the religion of Zarathustra. But in later Mazdeism there are many such importations. This religion, in its course from east to west, came in contact with beliefs and usages with which, though foreign to its own nature, it yet came to terms.

Mazdeism is not originally a markedly priestly religion; it is thought that it became so when planted in Media. No doubt there were germs in the early Iranian religion of a priestly system. Zarathustra himself was a priest and was favourable to due religious observances.

But it is quite contrary to his spirit that life should be governed entirely by ritual law. It was in Media that this came to be the case. The name of Magi, originally perhaps that of a tribe, became in Media the name of the priesthood, and so furnished an additional t.i.tle for Mazdeism. It is to this stage of the religion that the priestly legislation of the Vendidad, with all its puritanical regulation of life, is to be ascribed. (The practice of exposing the bodies of the dead to be devoured by birds of prey is probably of Scythian origin.) In this period also, remote from the origin of the religion, we find a new view of Zarathustra himself and of his revelation. In the earlier sources Zarathustra composes his hymns in a natural manner; he is not an absolute lawgiver, but depends on princes for the carrying out of his views. In the later works the revelation takes place in a series of private interviews between Ahura and Zarathustra; the prophet puts questions to the G.o.d, and the G.o.d dictates in reply sentences which are at once promulgated as sacred laws. Mazdeism, like other religions, has its wooden age, its verbal inspiration, and its priestly code.

To trace the lines by which the influence of the religion of Persia a.s.serted itself in the wider world would be a large enterprise: only a few indications can be given here. One great service which that religion did to the world was undoubtedly that it had sympathy with the Jews, and enabled Jewish monotheism to take a fresh start on its way to become a religion for mankind. Mazdeism itself had a tinge of universalism; Zarathustra expected his religion to spread beyond his own land, and it did spread over all the provinces of Iran. It never became a world-religion, but it might have done so had it not become swathed and choked in Magism or had any new movement arisen in it to a.s.sert the supremacy of its purely human over its artificial elements. But Ahura himself, perhaps, was too abstract and philosophic a G.o.d to inspire missionary ardour; it needed a being more firmly rooted in history, a G.o.d who had done more to prove the energy and intensity of his nature, and, further, a G.o.d more undoubtedly omnipotent than Ahura, to establish a universal rule.

The interesting inquiry remains, how far the Jewish religion was modified by its contact with the Persian. The laws of purity in the Jewish priestly code find a close parallel in the Vendidad; but with the Israelites the notion of religious purity existed, and was worked out in considerable detail, as we see from Deuteronomy, before the exile, and therefore long before the period of the Vendidad. The belief in the resurrection, found among the Jews after the exile, and not before it, has been maintained by many to be a loan from Persia, where the belief in future reward and punishment was a settled thing from the time of Zarathustra. But the Jews do not appear to have grasped this belief all at once or fully formed. They arrived at it gradually, many Old Testament scholars affirm, and by spiritual inferences timidly put forth at first, from their own religious consciousness. A belief which the Jewish religion was capable of producing of itself need not, without clearer evidence than we possess, be regarded as borrowed. We are not on much surer ground when we come to ask whether the angels and demons of Judaism are connected with those of Persia. This belief also arises naturally in Judaism, where G.o.d came to be thought of as very high and very inaccessible, and intermediate beings were therefore needed. Some of the figures of the Jewish spirit-world are, no doubt, due to Persia; the Ashmodeus of the book of Tobit is a Persian figure. Later Judaism is like Parsism in arranging the heavenly beings in a hierarchy, and a.s.signing to the chief angels special functions in the administration of G.o.d's kingdom, and still more so when the upper hierarchy is confronted by a lower one with a great adversary and father of lies at its head. But this takes place long after the Persian contact.

The Persian deities had, as a rule, too little legend to enable them to be received in other countries. Ahura does not travel. Anaitis is thought to have pa.s.sed into Greece, changing her name to Aphrodite, but also to the severer Artemis; but she is perhaps not original in Persia. The Persian G.o.d best known in other lands was Mithra, the sun-G.o.d and G.o.d of wisdom. He was a favourite with the Roman armies in the early empire, and representations of him as a hero in the act of slaying a bull in a cave have been found in many lands. There were also mysteries connected with him, in which the candidates had to pa.s.s through a great series of trials and hardships. Persia influenced Europe and the west of Asia at the same period in another way. Manicheism, a system which was one of the three great universal religions of that time, and had a worship and a priesthood and a sacred literature of its own, was founded by a native of Persia. He laboured at a distance from his own country, and the doctrines he propounded came more from Chaldea than from Persia, and consisted of great histories, like those of the Gnostics, of the doings and sufferings of cosmic and other persons; a great struggle between the powers of light and those of darkness was one of its princ.i.p.al features. The worship of this church was spiritual; its morals were in theory of the purest and most ascetic kind, being founded on a principle of dualism in the material world, and requiring much self-denial and long fasts. The higher virtue of the system was not, however, required of the ordinary member. Later Parsism, both in Iran and in India, has shown a disposition to cast off dualism, and to become, both philosophically and practically, a monistic system.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

_S. B. E._ vols. iv., xxiii. (Darmesteter); x.x.xi. (Mills). _The Zendavesta_, vols. v., xviii., xxiv., x.x.xvii., xlvii. Pahlavi Texts (E. W. West).

_The Histories of Antiquity_ of Duncker, Maspero, and Ed. Meyer.

Haug's _Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsis_. Second Edition, 1878,

F. Windischmann, _Zoroastr. Studien_, 1863.

Geldner, "Zoroaster," in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_; "Zoroastrianism,"

in _Encyclopaedia Bibl._

Mills, _A Study of the Five Zarathustrian Gathas_, 1892-94.

Lehmann, in De la Saussaye.

Dadhabai Naoroji, _The Pa.r.s.ee Religion_.

On Mithraism, _Dieterich Eine Mithras-liturgie._

c.u.mont, _The Mysteries of Mithra_, 1903.

PART V UNIVERSAL RELIGION

CHAPTER XXII CHRISTIANITY

The writer is aware that in offering a chapter on Christianity at the conclusion of this work, he attempts a difficult task. If treated at all, Christianity must be dealt with in the same way as the other religions, and no a.s.sumptions must be made for it which were not made for them. And a view of our own religion written, not from the standpoint of the faith and love we feel towards it but of scientific accuracy, must appear to many pious Christians to be cold and meagre.

But, on the other hand, Christianity is the key of the arch we have been building, the consummating member of the development we have sought to trace, and to withhold any estimate of its character would be to leave our work most imperfect. It seems better, therefore, that some hints at least should be offered on this part of the subject.

Christianity cannot indeed be dealt with in the same proportion as the other religions; that would far exceed our s.p.a.ce. But some views are offered regarding its essential nature, which the writer believes to be so firmly founded in fact that even those who are not Christians cannot deny them, and thus to afford a valid criterion for the comparison of Christianity with other faiths.

In the chapter on the religion of Israel we saw how the prophets before and during the exile began to cherish the idea of a new relation between G.o.d and man, which would not depend on sacrifice nor be confined to Israel. G.o.d, they declared, was preparing a new age, in which he would receive man to more intimate communion than before; and man would be guided in the right path, not by covenants and laws, but by the constant inspiration of a present deity. The new religion would be one which all nations could share. Jerusalem, the seat of the true faith, would attract all eyes; all would turn to her because of the Lord her G.o.d.

But, alas, instead of growing broader to realise its universal destiny, the religion of Israel grew narrower after the exile, and seemed to forget the prospects thus opened up to it. Judaism, though immeasurably enriched in its inner consciousness by the teaching of the prophets, maintained its earlier semi-heathenish forms of worship, only surrounding them with new stateliness and new significance; and clothed itself in a hard sh.e.l.l of public ritual and personal observance. The Jews separated themselves rigorously from the world, and cultivated an exclusive pride; as if their religion had been given them for themselves alone, and not for mankind. Under the Maccabees they displayed the most heroic courage and tenacity, maintaining their own beliefs and rites amid the flood of h.e.l.lenism which at one time almost swept them away. That they carried their nationality unimpaired through this period is one of the most wonderful achievements of the Jewish race. In the succeeding period, however, many signs appeared showing that their religion was losing energy. The rule of the priests and scribes extended more and more over the whole of life, tradition and observance grew more and more extensive, but the moral judgment lost its elasticity. The sense of the divine presence grew faint, and mult.i.tudes of spirits filled the air instead, oppressing human life with a sense of vague anxiety. As political independence was lost, the people became less happy and more easily excited. But while formalism held increasing sway over their actions, imagination was free, and surrounded both the past history of Israel and its future triumphs with manifold embellishments.