Chapter M: S. Reinach’s opinion that in Totemism is to be found the secret of (1)

the domestication of animals offers an attractive solution to that great problem, but it has not been, nor do I think that it will ever be, generally accepted. It, is however, plain, that where population is sparse, and dogs and guns undreamt of, wild animals would be far less wild than in countries with all the advantages of civilisation; the tameness of birds on lonely islands when the explorer first makes his descent is a case in point. No doubt, therefore, with the encouragement they received, the animal Totems acquired a considerable degree of tameness, but from that to domestication there is a long step. Our household “Totem,” the robin, is relatively tame; he will even eat crumbs on the breakfast-table, but he flies away in springtime and we see him no more.

Besides being a social institution and a friendly bond between man and beast, Totemism is an attempt to explain the universe. Its spiritual vitality depends on the widely rooted belief in archetypes; the things seen are the mirror of the things unseen, the material is unreal, the immaterial the only reality. We are ourselves but cages of immortal birds. The real “I” is somewhere else; it may be in a fish, as in the Indian folk-tale, or it may be in a god. I do not know, by the by, if it has been remarked that a man can be a Totem: the incarnation of the indwelling race-spirit. The Emperor of Japan corresponds exactly to this description. The deified Cæsar was a Totem. A god can be a Totem: among the Hidery (islanders of the North Pacific whose interesting legends were published by the Chicago Folk-lore Association) the raven, which is their Totem, is the manifestation of the god Ne-kilst-lass who created the world. Here Totemism approaches till it touches Egyptian zoomorphism. Was this form an earlier or a later development than that in which the Totem is merely an ancestor? Our inability to reply shows our real want of certainty as to whether Totemism is a body of belief in a state of becoming or _in a state of dissolution_.

_Photo:_ _Egypt Exploration Fund._
HATHOR COW.
Cairo Museum.
(_Found in 1906 by Dr. E. Naville at Deir-el-bahari._)]

We do know that Egyptian zoomorphism is not old, at least in the exaggerated shape it assumed in the worship of the bull Apis. It is a cult which owed its success to the animistic tendency of the human mind, but its particular cause is to be looked for in crystallised figurative language. The stupendous marble tombs of the sacred bulls that seem to overpower us in the semi-obscurity of the Serapeum remind one of how easy it is to draw false conclusions relative to the past if we possess only half-lights upon it: had Egyptian hieroglyphics never yielded up their secret we might have judged the faith of Egypt to have been the most material, instead of one of the most spiritual of religions.

In Egyptian (as in Assyrian) cosmogony the visible universe is the direct creation of God. “The god who is immanent in all things is the creator of every animal: under his name of Ram, of the sheep, Bull, of the cows: he loves the scorpion in his hole, he is the god of the crocodile who plunges in the water: he is the god of those who rest in their graves. Amon is an image, Atmee is an image, Ra is an image: HE alone maketh himself in millions of ways.” Amon Ra is described in another grand hymn as the maker of the grass for the cattle, of fruitful trees for men yet unborn; causing the fish to live in the river, the birds to fill the air, giving breath to those in the egg, giving food to the bird that perches, to the creeping thing and to the flying thing alike, providing food for the rats in their holes, feeding the flying things in every tree. “Hail to thee, say all creatures. Hail to thee for all these things: the One, Alone with many hands, awake while all men sleep, to seek out the good of all creatures, “Amon Sustainer of all!” This is, indeed, a majestic psalm of universal life.

Contrary to what was long the impression, the Wheel of Being was not an Egyptian doctrine, but the dead, or rather some of them, were believed to have the power of transforming themselves into animals for limited periods. It was a valued privilege of the virtuous dead: the form of a heron, a hawk or a swallow was a convenient travelling dress. Four-footed beasts were reserved to gods.

There was no prejudice against sport if carried on with due regard to vested sacred rights. The first hunting-dog whose name we know was Behkaa, who was buried with his master, his name being inscribed over his picture on the tomb. The injury of animals sacred to the gods was, of course, a grave sin. Among the protests of innocence of a departing soul we read: “I have not clipped the skins of the sacred beasts; I have not hunted wild animals in their pasturages; I have not netted the sacred birds; I have not turned away the cattle of the gods; I have not stood between a god and his manifestation.”

The Egyptian mind, which was essentially religious, saw the “god who is immanent in all things” yet standing outside these things to sustain them with a guiding providence; the highly trained Chinese mind, with its philosophic trend, saw the divine indivisible intelligence without volition illuminating all that lived: “The mind of man and the mind of trees, birds and beasts, is just the one mind of heaven and earth, only brighter or duller by reflection: as light looks brighter when it falls on a mirror than when it falls on a dark surface, so divine reason is less bright in cow or sheep than in man.” This fine definition was given by Choo-Foo-Tsze, the great exponent of Confucianism, who, when he was four years old, surprised his father by asking, on being told that the sky was heaven, “What is above it?” Choo-Foo-Tsze in the thirteenth century anticipated some modern conclusions of geology by remarking that since sea shells were found on lofty mountains as if generated in the middle of stones, it was plain “that what was below became lifted up, what was soft became hard”; it was a deep subject, he said, and ought to be investigated. Long before the Nolan, Confucius had conceived the idea of the great Monad: “one God who contains and comprehends the whole world.” It was an idea entirely incomprehensible to all but a few educated men in any age. Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism left the Chinese masses what they found them—a people whose folk-lore was their religion. Were they asked to believe in the Wheel of Being? They made that folk-lore too. Dr. Giles tells the folk-tale of a certain gentleman who, having taken a very high degree, enjoyed the privilege (which is admitted to be uncommon) of recollecting what happened between his last death and birth. After he died, he was cited before a Judge of Purgatory and his attention was attracted by a quantity of skins of sheep, dogs, oxen, horses, which were hanging in a row. These were waiting for the souls which might be condemned to wear them; when one was wanted, it was taken down and the man’s own skin was stripped off and the other put on. This gentleman was condemned to be a sheep; the attendant demons helped him on with his sheep-skin when the Recording Officer suddenly mentioned that he had once saved a man’s life. The Judge, after looking at his books, ruled that such an act balanced all his misdoings: then the demons set to work to pull off the sheep-skin bit by bit, which gave the poor gentleman dreadful pain, but at last it was all got off except one little piece which was still sticking to him when he was born again as a man.

This story is amusing as showing what a mystical doctrine may come to when it gets into the hands of the thoroughgoing realist. For the Chinese peasant the supernatural has no mystery. To him it is a mere matter of ordinary knowledge that beasts, birds, fishes and insects not only have ghosts but also ghosts of ghosts—for the first ghost is liable to die. If any of these creatures do not destroy life in three existences, they may be born as men—a belief no doubt due to the Buddhists, who in China seem to have concentrated all their energies on humanitarian propaganda and let metaphysics alone. Taoism has been called an “organised animism.” Organised or unorganised, animism is still the popular faith of China. It is too convenient to lightly abandon, for it explains everything. For instance, whatever is odd, unexpected, very lucky, very unlucky, can be made as plain as day by mentioning the word “fox.” Any one may be a fox without your knowing it: the fox is a jinnee, an elf who can work good or harm to man; who can see the future, get possession of things at a distance, and generally outmatch the best spiritualist medium. In Chinese folk-lore the fox has, as it were, made a monopoly of the world-wide notion that animals have a more intimate knowledge of the supernatural than men. Soothsayers are thought to be foxes because they know what is going to happen.

Man’s speculations about himself and the universe arrange themselves under three heads: those which have not yet become a system, those which are a system, those which are the remains of a system. It is impossible that any set of ideas began by being a system unless it were revealed by an angel from heaven. But no sooner do ideas become systematic than they pass into the stage of dogma which is accepted not discussed. Everything is made to fit in with them. Thus to find the free play of the human mind one must seek it where there are the fewest formulæ, written or unwritten, for tradition is as binding as any creed or code. There are savage races which, if they ever had Totemism, have preserved few if any traces of it. To take them one by one and inquire into their views on animals would be well worth doing, but it is beyond my modest scope. I will say this, however—show me a savage who has not some humane and friendly ideas about animals! The impulse to confess brotherhood with man’s poor relations is everywhere the same: the excuses or reasons given for it vary a little. The animal to be kindly treated is the sanctuary of a god, the incarnation of a tribe, or simply the shelter of a poor wandering ghost.

The Amazulu, one of the finest of savage races, believe that _some_ snakes are Amatongo—some, not all. In fact, these snakes which are dead men are rather rare. One kind is black and another green. An Itongo does not come into the house by the door, nor does it eat frogs or mice. It does not run away like other snakes. Some say, “Let it be killed.” Others interfere, “What, kill a man?” If a man die who had a scar and you see a snake with a scar, ten to one it is that man. Then, at night, the village chief _dreams_ and the dead man speaks to him. “Do you now wish to kill me? Do you already forget me? I thought I would come and ask you for food, and do you kill me?” Then he tells him his name.

Without any teaching, without any system, the savage thinks that the appearances which stand before him in sleep are real. If they are not real, what are they? The savage may not be a reasonable being, but he is a being who reasons.

In the morning the village chief tells his dream and orders a sin-offering to the Itongo (ghost) lest he be angry and kill them. A bullock or a goat is sacrificed and they eat the flesh. Afterwards they look everywhere for the snake, but it has vanished.

A snake that forces its way rapidly into a house is known to be a liar and he is a liar still. Do they turn him out of doors with a lecture on the beauty of veracity? Far from that. “They sacrifice something to such an Itongo.” A few men turn into poisonous snakes, but this is by no means common. If offended, the Amatongo cause misfortune, but even if pleased they do not seem to confer many benefits; perhaps they cannot, for surely it is easier to do evil than good. Once, however, a snake which was really the spirit of a chief, placed its mouth on a sore which a child had; the mother was in a great fright, but happily she did not interfere and the snake healed the sore and went silently away.

_Photo:_ _Mansell._
WILD GOATS AND YOUNG.
British Museum.
(_Assyrian Relief._)]

Other animals are sometimes human beings as well as snakes. The lizard is often the Itongo of an old woman. A boy killed some lizards in a cattle-pen with stones. Then he went and told his grandmother, who said he had done very wrong—those lizards were chiefs of the village and should have been worshipped. I think the grandmother was a humane old person; I even suspect that she said the lizards were chiefs and not old women to make the admonition more awful. The man who told this story to Canon Callaway (from whose valuable work on the Amazulu I take these notes) added that, looking back to the incident, he doubted if the lizards were Amatongo after all, because no harm came of their murder. He thought that they must have been merely wild animals which had become tame owing to people mistakenly thinking that they were Amatongo.

What can one say to boys who ill-treat lizards? I own that I have threatened them with ghostly treatment of the same sort. I even tried the supernatural argument with a little Arab boy, otherwise a nice intelligent child, who was throwing stones at a lizard which was moving at the bottom of the deep Roman well at El Djem: I did not know then that the persecution of lizards in Moslem lands is supposed (I hope erroneously) to have been ordered by Mohammed “because the lizard mimics the attitude of the Faithful at prayer.”

The lizard, one of the most winsome of God’s creatures, has suffered generally from the prejudice which made reptile a word of reproach. It is the more worthy of remark, therefore, that in a place where one would hardly expect it, protective superstition has done its work of rescue: Sicilian children catch lizards, but let them go unhurt to intercede for them before the Lord, as the lizard is held to be “in the presence of the Lord in heaven.” One wonders if this is some distant echo of the text about the angels of the children (their archetypes) who always see God.

Not always were reptiles scorned, but, possibly, they were always feared. Man’s first idea is to worship what he fears; his second idea, which may not come for many thousand years, is to throw a stone at it. The stone, besides representing physical fear, at a given moment also represents religious reprobation of what had been an object of worship in a forsaken faith. Primitive man took the interest of a wondering child in the great Saurian tribe. How did he know that they _flew_, that there were “dragons” on the earth? How did he know that the snake once had legs?—for if the snake of Eden was ordered to go on its belly, the inference seems to be that he was thought once to have moved in another way. The snake has lost his legs and the lizard his wings, and how the ancient popular imagination of the world made such accurate guesses about them must be left a riddle, unless we admit that it was guided by the fossil remains of extinct monsters.

The serpent of the Biblical story was, says Dr. H. P. Smith, “simply a jinnee—a fairy if you will—possessed of more knowledge than the other animals, but otherwise like them.” Here, again, we meet in the most venerable form, the belief that animals know more than men. Can we resist the conclusion that to people constantly inclined towards magic like the old-world Jews, it must have appeared that Eve was dabbling in magic—by every rule of ancient religion, the sin of sins?

The cult of the serpent in its many branches is the greatest of animal cults, and it is the one in which we see most clearly the process by which man from being an impressionist became a symbolist, and from being a symbolist became a votary. We have only to read the Indian statistics of the number of persons annually killed by snake-bite to be persuaded that fear must have been the original feeling with which man regarded the snake. Fear is a religious feeling in primitive man, but other religious feelings were added to it—admiration, for the snake, as all who have had the good luck to observe it in its wild state must agree, is a beautiful, graceful, and insinuating creature; a sense of mystery, a sense of fascination which comes from those keen eyes fixed fearlessly upon yours, the simple secret, perhaps, of the much discussed power of snakes to fascinate their prey. What wonder if man under the influence of these combined impressions, symbolised in the serpent a divine force which could be made propitious by worship!

In the forming of cults there has always been this unconscious passage from impressions to symbols, from symbols to “manifestations.” But there has been also the conscious use of symbols by the priests and sages of ancient religions, in imparting as much of divine knowledge to the uninitiated as they thought that the uninitiated could bear. The origin of serpent worship has a probable relationship with this conscious use of symbols as well as with their unconscious growth.

Besides the prejudice against reptiles, modern popular superstition has placed several animals under a ban, and especially the harmless bat and the useful barn owl. Traditional reasons exist, no doubt, in every case; but stronger than these are the associations of such creatures with the dark in which the sane man of a certain temperament becomes a partial lunatic; a prey to unreal terrors which the flap of a bat’s wing or the screech of an owl is enough to work up to the point of frenzy. It is a most unfortunate thing for an animal if it be the innocent cause of a _frisson_, a feeling of uncanny dread. The little Italian owl, notwithstanding that it too comes out at dusk, has escaped prejudice. This was the owl of Pallas Athene and of an earlier cult. As in the case of the serpent, its wiles to fascinate its prey were the groundwork of its reputation for wisdom. Of this there cannot be, I think, any doubt, though the droll bobs and curtesies which excite an irresistible and fatal curiosity in small birds, have suggested in the mind of the modern man a thing so exceedingly far from wisdom as _civetteria_, which word is derived from _civetta_—“the owl of Minerva” as Italian class-books say. The descent from the goddess of wisdom to the coquette is the cruellest decadence of all!

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VI

THE FAITH OF IRAN

THE Zoroastrian theory of animals cannot be severed from the religious scheme with which it is bound up. It is not a side-issue, but an integral part of the whole. It would be useless to attempt to treat it without recalling the main features in the development of the faith out of which it grew.

In the first place, who were the people, occupying what we call Persia, to whom the Sage, who was not one of them, brought his interpretation of the knowledge of good and evil? The early Iranians must have broken off from the united body of the Aryans at a time when they spoke a common language, which though not Sanscrit, was very like it. The affinities between Sanscrit and the dialect called with irremediable inaccuracy “Zend” are of the strongest. From this we conclude that, on their establishment in their new home, the Iranians differed little from the race of whose customs the Rig-Veda gives—not a full picture—but a faithful outline. Pastoral folk, devoted to their flocks and herds, but not unlearned in the cultivation of the earth and the sowing of grain, they had reached what may be called the highest stage of primitive civilisation. Though milk, butter and cooked corn formed their principal food, on feast days they also ate meat, chiefly the flesh of oxen and buffaloes, which they were careful to cook thoroughly. The progressive Aryans, who called half-raw meat by a term exactly corresponding to the too familiar “rosbif saignant,” denounced the more savage peoples who consumed it as “wild men” or “demons.” They kept horses, asses and mules; horses were sacrificed occasionally; for instance, kings sacrificed a horse to obtain male issue. The wild boar was hunted, if not in the earliest, at least in very early times. The dog was prized for its fidelity as guardian of the house and flocks, but there is no trace of its having been protected by extraordinary regulations such as those which later came into force in Iran. On the other hand, the name of dog had never yet been used in reproach. It seems to have been among Semitic races that the contempt for man’s best friend arose, but it is morally certain that it arose nowhere till dogs became scavengers of cities. It was the homeless pariah cur that gave the dog the bad name from which have sprung so many ugly words registered in modern vocabularies. Even now, when Jew or Moslem uses “dog” in a bad sense, he means “cur”; he knows quite well the other kind of dog—he knows Tobit’s dog, which, bounding on before the young man and the angel, told the glad tidings of his master’s return; Tobit’s dog which was one of the animals admitted by Mohammed into highest heaven. But “pariah dog” became synonymous of pariah, and notwithstanding the present tendency to attribute the opprobrium of the pig to original sanctity (and consequent reservation), I am inclined to think that the pig likewise came to be scorned because he was a scavenger. In some Indian cities herds of wild pigs still enter the gates just before they are closed at dusk, to pass out of them as soon as they are opened in the morning: during the night they do their work excellently, and by day they take a well-earned sleep in the jungle. They deserve gratitude, for they keep the cities free from disease, but, like other public servants, they scarcely get it.

In Vedic times every home had its watch-dog, whose warning bark was as unwelcome to lovers as it was to robbers. The Rig-Veda preserves the prayer of a young girl who asks that her father, her mother, her grandfather, _and the watch-dog_ may sleep soundly while she meets her expected lover: a charming glimpse of the chaste freedom of early Aryan manners. The newly-wedded wife enters her husband’s house as mistress, not as slave; the elders say to the young couple: “You are master and mistress of this house; though there be father-in-law and mother-in-law, they are placed under you.” If that was not quite what happened, yet the principle was granted, and there is much in that. The bride rode to her new home in a car drawn by four milk-white oxen; when she alighted at the threshold, these golden words were spoken to her: “Make thyself loved for the sake of the children that will come to thee; guard this house, be as one with thy husband; may you grow old here together. Cast no evil looks, hate not thy spouse, be gentle in thought and deed _even_ _to the animals of this home_.” Bride and bridegroom are exhorted to be of one heart, of one mind, “to love each other as a cow loves her calf,” a simple and true metaphor full of the country-side, full of the youth of the world.

If these were the customs and this was the life which the Iranians may be supposed to have taken with them, what was the religion? The early Aryans had a Nature-cult more spiritualised under the form of Varuna and more materialised under the form of Indra. Some students of the Avesta have thought that here could be found the elements of the Dualism which formed the essential doctrine of Mazdaism. But it is almost certain that no real Dualism existed in oldest Iran. The Avesta once contrasts the worshippers of God with the worshippers of Daevas, of those who breed the cow and have the care of it with those who ill-treat it and slaughter it at their sacrifices. But Indra-worship has no connexion with devil-worship, nor does this or similar texts prove that devil-worship, properly so called, ever flourished in Iran. Other religious reformers than Zoroaster have named the devotees of former religions “devil-worshippers.” For the rest, there is reason to think that in the Avesta the term was applied to Turanian raiders, not to true Iranians.

_Photo:_ _Mansell._
ASSYRIAN GOD CARRYING ANTELOPE AND WHEAT-EAR.
British Museum.]

In an Assyrian inscription, Ahura Mazda is said to have created joy for _all_ creatures: a belief which Mazdean Dualism impugns. So far as can be guessed, the earliest Iranian faith was the worship of good spirits—of a Good Spirit. Less pure extra-beliefs may, or rather must, have existed contemporaneously, but they remained in the second rank. The cult of good spirits was the home-cult of shepherd and herdsman offered to the genii of their flocks and herds. While these genii answered the purpose of the lares or little saints everywhere dear to humble hearts, it is probable that in character they already resembled the Fravashis or archetypes that were to play so great a part in Mazdean doctrine. The cult of the Good Spirit, the national and kingly cult, was the worship of one God whose most worthy symbol, before Zoroaster as after, was the sun and whose sacrament with men was fire. The early Iranian had no temple, no altar: he went up into a high place and offered his prayer and sacrifice without priest or pomp. If we wish to trace his faith back to an Indian source, instead of bringing on the scene Varuna and Indra, it will be better to inquire whether there were elements of the same faith underlying the unwieldy fabric of Vedic religion. The answer is, that there were. The grandest text in the Rig-Veda, the one text recognised from farthest antiquity as of incalculable value, is the old Persian religion contained in a formula: “That Sun’s supremacy—God—let us adore Which may well direct.”

“Enable with perpetual light,
The dulness of our blinded sight.”

So great a virtue was attributed to the Gayatri that the mind which thought it was supposed to unite with the object of thought: the eyes of the soul looked on Truth, of which all else is but the shadow. This is the spirit in which it is still repeated every day by every Hindu. The sacrosanct words were “Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva,” or, yet more often, they are described as “the mother of the Vedas,” which, if it means anything, means that they are older than the Vedas. The point most to be noticed about the Gayatri is that its importance cannot be set aside by saying that this text is to be explained by Henotheism: the habit of referring to each god immediately addressed as supreme. Nor was the text selected arbitrarily by Western monotheists: for thousands of years before any European knew it, the natives of India had singled it out as the most solemn affirmation of man’s belief in the Unseen.

It is open to argument, though not to proof, that the Gayatri crystallises a creed which the Iranians took with them in their migration. Peoples then moved in clans, not in a motley crowd gathered on an emigrant steamer. The clan or clans to which the Iranians belonged may have clung to a primordial faith, not yet overlaid by myths which materialised symbols and mysteries which made truth a secret.

Such speculations are guess-work, but that the primitive religion of Persia was essentially monotheistic is an opinion which is likely to survive all attacks upon it. On less sure grounds stands the identification of that primitive religion with Zoroastrianism. The great authorities of a former generation, and amongst them my distinguished old friend, Professor Jules Oppert, believed that Cyrus was a Mazdean. But there is a good deal to support the view that Zoroastrianism did not become the State religion till the time of the Sásánians, who, as a new dynasty, grasped the political importance of having under them a strong and organised priesthood. Before that time the Magians seem to have been rather a sort of Salvation Army or Society of Jesus than the directors of a national Church.

As late as the reign of Darius the Persians frequently buried their dead, a practice utterly repugnant to the Mazdean. Again, from Greek sources we know that the Persian kings sacrificed hecatombs of animals; thousands of oxen, asses, stags, &c., were immolated every day. Darius ordered one hundred bullocks, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs to be given to the Jews on the dedication of the new Temple (as well as twelve he-goats as sin-offerings for the twelve tribes) so that they might offer “sacrifices of sweet savours unto the God of heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons.” Evidently Darius considered profuse animal sacrifices as a natural part of any great religious ceremony. Can it be supposed that such slaughter would have pleased a strict Zoroastrian? The Mazdeans retained the sacrifice of flesh as food: a small piece of the cooked meat eaten at table was included in the daily offering with bread, grain, fruits and the Homa juice, which was first drunk by the officiating priest, then by the worshippers, and finally thrown on the sacred fire. The small meat-offering was not animal sacrifice or anything at all like it. The Parsis substitute milk even for this small piece of meat, perhaps because the meat was usually beef, which would have caused offence to their Hindu fellow-citizens. I asked a Parsi High Priest who lunched with me at Basle during the second Congress for the History of Religions, what viands were eschewed by his community? He replied that they avoided both beef and the flesh of swine, but only out of respect for their neighbours’ rules: to them oil alone was forbidden—probably because of its virtue as a light-giver. In the Zoroastrian sacrifice it was never lost sight of that the outward act was but one of piety and obedience; the true sacrifice was of the heart: “I offer good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” It is hardly needful to say that the Mithraic taurobolium was in sheer contradiction to Mazdean law. Heretical sects were the bane of Zoroastrianism, and with one of these sprang up the strange practices which the Romans brought into Europe. Possibly its origin should be sought in some infiltration from the West, for it is more suggestive of Orphic rites than of any form of Eastern ceremonies. A Christian writer of the name of Socrates, who lived in the fifth century, said that at Alexandria, in a cavern consecrated to Mithra, human skulls and bones were found, the inference being that human sacrifice was the real rite, symbolised by the slaying of the bull. The source of this information is suspect, but even if not guilty of such excesses, the Mithra-worshippers of Western Persia must have been rank corrupters of the faith. In the Avesta, Mithra is the luminous æther; sometimes he appears as an intercessor; sometimes he dispenses the mercy or wields the vengeance of God. But in reality he is an attribute, about the nature of which members of the faith had less excuse for making mistakes than we have. It is difficult for the Indian or Japanese not to make analogous mistakes concerning some forms of worship in Southern Europe.

In Old Iran the Sacred Fire was kept perpetually alight. Sweet perfumes were spread around the place of prayer, for which a little eminence was chosen, but there were no images and no temples. Archæologists have failed to find traces of a building set apart for religious worship among the splendid ruins of Persepolis: the “forty towers” only tell of the pleasure-palace of an Eastern king. Was it that the profound spirituality of this people shrank not only from carving a graven image of the deity, but also from giving him a house made with hands? What could the maker of the firmament want with human fanes? Some such thought may have caused the Iranians to suppress for so long a time the instinct which impels man to build temples. In any case, it seems as if Cyrus and after him Darius threw themselves into the scheme for rebuilding the Hebrew temple with all the more enthusiasm from the fact that immemorial custom held them back from temple-building at home. The cuneiform inscriptions bear witness that these kings were monotheists: they believed in one sole creator of heaven and earth, by whose will kings reign and govern, and if they invoked the aid of heavenly hierarchs they never confused the creatures, however powerful, with the creator. That Creator they called by the name of Ahura Mazda, but they recognised that he was one, whatever the name might be by which he was called. “Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia: the Lord God of Heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and He hath charged me to build Him a house at Jerusalem, which is Judah.” In the uncanonical Book of Esdras, it is said more significantly that King Cyrus “commanded to have the house of the Lord in Jerusalem built where they should worship with eternal fire.” The recently deciphered Babylonian inscriptions have been brought forward to show that the Jews were mistaken in thinking that Cyrus was a monotheist, because he honoured Merodach in Babylon just as he had honoured Jehovah at Jerusalem. He was, it is said, a “polytheist at heart.” If he was, his honouring Merodach does not prove it. To my mind it proves exactly the reverse. Cyrus understood the monotheism which was at the bottom of the Babylonian religious system and which these very tablets have revealed to modern scholarship. He understood that “however numerous and diversified the nations of the earth may be, the God who reigns over them all can never be more than one.”[2]

Footnote 2:

Words written by a Japanese reformer named Okubo about fifty years
ago.

He was governed by expediency in his respect for the faiths of his subject peoples, but he was governed also by something higher than expediency. That Darius Hystaspis, who is allowed to have been a monotheist, continued his policy, shows that it was not thought to involve disloyalty to Ahura Mazda since of such disloyalty Darius would have been incapable.

If we grant that the Iranians were, in the main, monotheistic at a date when not more than a part of the population professed Zoroastrianism, the question follows, of what was the difference between the reformed and the unreformed religion? To answer this satisfactorily, we must remember that the paramount object of Zoroaster was less change than conservation. Like Moses whom an attractive if not well-founded theory makes his contemporary, he saw around a world full of idolatry, and he feared lest the purer faith of Iran should be swamped by the encroachments of polytheism and atheism (for, strangely enough, the Avesta abounds in references to sheer negation). The aim of every doctrine or practice which he introduced was to revivify, to render more comprehensible, more consistent, the old monotheistic faith.

With regard to practice, the most remarkable innovation was that which concerned the disposal of the dead. It cannot be explained as a relic of barbarism: it was introduced with deliberation and with the knowledge that it would shock human sensibility then, just as much as it does now. The avowed reason for giving the dead to vultures or animals is that burial defiles the earth. It was recognised that this argument was open to the objection that birds or beasts were likely to drop portions of dead bodies on the earth. The objection was met with scholastic resourcefulness not to say casuistry: it was declared that “accidents” do not count. Though so strongly insisted on in the Avesta, the practice only became general at a late period: even after Mazdeism had made headway, bodies were often enveloped in wax to avoid defilement of the earth while evading the prescribed rite. Cremation, the natural alternative to burial, would have polluted the sacred fire. It was observed, no doubt, that the consumption of the dead by living animals was the means employed by Nature for disposing of the dead. Why do we so rarely see a dead bird or hare or rabbit or squirrel? The fact is not mysterious when we come to look into it. It may have been thought that what Nature does must be well done. The Parsis themselves seem to suppose that this and other prescriptions of their religious law were inspired by sanitary considerations, and they attribute to them their comparative immunity from plague during the recent epidemics at Bombay. Defilement of water by throwing any impurity into rivers is as severely forbidden as the defilement of the earth. Possibly another reason against burial was the desire to prevent anything like the material cult of the dead and the association of the fortunes of the immortal soul with those of the mortal body, such as prevailed among the Egyptians, whose practices doubtless were known to the Magi by whom, rather than by any one man, the Mazdean law was framed. Finally, the last rites provided a recurrent object-lesson conducive to the mental habit of separating the pure from the impure. They reminded the Mazdean that life is pure because given by Ormuzd; death impure because inflicted by Ahriman. The rule of every religion is designed largely, if not chiefly, as a moral discipline.[3]

Footnote 3:

Among the Buddhists of Thibet the dead are given to dogs and birds of
prey as a last act of charity—to feed the hungry.

The true originality of Zoroastrianism as a religious system lies in the dualistic conception of creation which is the nexus that connects all its parts. This was seen at once, when the Avesta became known in Europe, but the idea was so entirely misunderstood and even travestied, that Zoroaster was represented as a believer in two gods whose power was equal, if, indeed, the power of the evil one were not the greater. Recently among the manuscripts of Leopardi were found these opening lines of an unfinished “Hymn to Ahriman”:—

“Re delle cose, autor del mondo, arcana
Malvagità, sommo potere e somma
Intelligenza, eterno
Dator de’ mali e regitor del moto....”

They are fine lines, but if Anro-Mainyus might fitly be called “arcana malvagità” and “dator de’ mali,” nothing could be farther removed from the Zoroastrian idea than the rest of the description. Ahriman possessed neither supreme power nor supreme intelligence, nor was he author of the world, but only of a small portion of it. To this day, however, it has pleased pessimists to claim Zoroaster, the most optimist of prophets, as one of their fraternity.

The real Ahriman gains in tremendous force from the vagueness of his personality. Sometimes he _acts_ as a person: as in the Temptation of Zoroaster when he offers him the kingdoms of the world if he will but serve him. But no artist would have dared to give him human form. And surely no one in Iran would have alluded to him by mild or good-humoured euphemisms. He shares this, however, with the mediæval devil, that he works at an eternally pre-destined disadvantage. He is fore-doomed to failure. Good is stronger than Evil, and Good is lasting, Evil is passing. In the end, Evil must cease to be.

Though not immortal, Ahriman was primordial. Unlike the fallen star of the morning, what he is, that he was. He did not choose Evil: he _is_ Evil as Ormuzd _is_ Good. He can create, but only things like himself. The notion that both Ormuzd and Ahriman proceeded from a prior entity, Boundless Time, is a late legend. Ormuzd and Ahriman existed always, the one in eternal light, the other in beginningless darkness. An immense vacuum divided the light from the darkness and Ahriman knew not Ormuzd, Evil knew not Good, till Good was externalised in the beneficent creation.

“Young life lowed through the meadows, the woods and the echoing
mountains,
Wandered bleating in valleys and warbled on blossoming branches.”

The sight of created things gave Ahriman the will to create corresponding things, evil instead of good. He made sin, disease, death, the flood, the earthquake, famine, slaughter, noxious animals. So the pieces were set down on the chess-board of being, and, as in all religions, man’s soul was the stake.

The difference from other religions lay in the determined effort to grapple with the problem of the origin of evil. The tribe of divine students among whom Mazdeism sprang up saw in that unsolved problem the great cause of unbelief, and they set themselves to solve it by the theory which J. S. Mill said was the only one which could reconcile philosophy with religion—the theory of primal forces at war. The Indian did not attempt to fathom it; the Egyptian and Assyrian set it aside; we know the offered Hebrew solution: “I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil, I, the Lord, do all these things.” But this is a statement, not a solution, because though it may be believed, it cannot be thought. The attraction of the dualistic conception is shown by nothing more clearly than by the extraordinary vitality of Manichæism in the face of every kind of persecution both in the East and West, although Manichæism, with its ascription of the creation of mankind to the Evil Principle, its depreciation of woman, its out-and-out asceticism which included abstinence from animal food (a rule borrowed by Mani from the Buddhists in his journey in India) contrasts unfavourably with the faith that did not make a single demand on human nature except to be good, even as its Creator was good.

The origin of the Magians was Semitic, or, as some think, præ-Semitic and præ-Aryan. Travellers brought tales of them to the ancient world which listened with a fascinated interest, while it failed to see the importance of the mighty religious phenomenon of Israel. The “Wise men of the East” had a charm for antiquity, as they were to have for the Infant Church which never tired of depicting them in its earliest art. Mention of the “Persarum Magos” is frequent from Herodotus to Cicero, who speaks of them under that name. According to Herodotus the Magi sang the Theogony, and Pausanias describes them as reading from a book which was certainly the Avesta, though it must not be overlooked that never but once does it contain the smallest reference to them. This tribe of divine students enjoyed a high reputation at the Babylonian Court, which seems less unexpected by the light of recent research than it did when the Babylonians and Assyrians were thought to be destitute of any trace of an esoteric religion tending to monotheism. That the Magians were monotheists cannot be disputed. Probably they were skilled in astronomy and in medicine, the two sciences which almost covered what was meant then by learning in the East. Probably also they were astrologers like other searchers of the heavens, but they were not magic-workers, a calling that had a bad name. The Magi in the Gospel story are supposed to have been guided by astronomical calculations; whatever these may have been, they could not have been ignorant of the prophecy in their own Scriptures of a Virgin who should give birth to the Saviour and Judge of men. The ante-natal soul of this Virgin had been venerated for centuries in Iran. An infiltration of Messianic prophecies might induce them to conclude that the Child would be “King of the Jews.” It was not likely that they would take so long a journey to do homage to any new-born earthly king, but it was quite possible that they might go in search of the promised Saviour.

_Photo:_ _Mansell._
COUNTING CATTLE.
British Museum.
(_Egyptian Fresco._)]

In Media we know that the people lived at one time in tribes, without kings. In one form or another, the tribal organisation existed and exists everywhere in the East. What is caste but a petrified tribal system? The first discovery which a European makes on landing on the skirts of the East, is that everything is done by tribes. The Algerian conjurors who swallow fire, drive nails into their heads and do other gruesome feats are a semi-religious tribe which has thrived from time immemorial on the exercise of the same profession. The dwarfs of the late Bey of Tunis, whom I saw at Bardo, belonged to a tribe which does nothing but furnish dwarfs. Apply to a high or worthy end this corporate pursuit of a given object and it must produce remarkable results.

The unanimous belief of the Greeks that Zoroaster was founder of the Magians is held no longer, but he is still thought to have been one of them. Moslem tradition made him the servant of a Hebrew prophet, and even serious Western students were inclined to trace Mazdeism to the Jewish prisoners who were brought into Media by the Assyrians. It is unnecessary to say that at present the Jews are regarded as the debtors.

There is no figure of a religious teacher so elusive as that of Zoroaster, and they are all elusive. But in the case of Zoroaster it is not only the man that eludes us—it is also his environment. Brahmanical India of to-day reflects as in a glass the society into which Sakya Muni cast his seed; in fact, we understand the seed-sowing better than the harvest; Buddhism at its apogee seems of the nature of an interlude in the history of the changeless East. China still throws light on its passionless sage, passionless in a sense so far deeper than the Indian recluses, who, though they knew it not, did but substitute for the passion of the flesh the more inebriating passion of the spirit. From the splendid treasury of præ-Islamic poetry, we know that the Arab race had acquired its specialised type before the Muezzin first called the faithful to prayer. The moral petrifaction of the many and the religious and patriotic ferment of the few which formed the _milieu_ of nascent Christianity, can be realised without any stretch of the imagination. Buddha, Confucius, and He that was greater than they, came into highly civilised societies in organised states; Mohammed came into an unorganised state which lacked political and religious cohesion, but the unity of race was already developed: the Emirs of the Soudan whose star set at Omdurman were the living pictures of the Arabs who first rallied to the Prophet’s banner. Of the society of Old Iran to which Zoroaster spoke, it is difficult to form a distinct idea and to judge how far it had moved away from early Aryan simplicity. We gather that it was still a society in which sheep-raising and dairy-farming played a preponderant part. Those modern expressions may serve us better than to say “shepherds” and “herdsmen,” since fixity of dwelling with the possession of what then was considered wealth seems to have been a very common case. Nomadic life lasted on, but it was held in disrepute. There appears to have been nothing like a national or warlike spirit such as that possessed by the Jews, though occasional Turanian incursions had to be repelled. There were few towns and many scattered villages and homesteads. We are conscious that these impressions derived from the Avesta may be partially erroneous. Teachers of religion only take note of political or other circumstances so far as it suits their purpose.

Zoroaster (the Greek reading of Zarathustra, which in modern Persian becomes Zardusht), was born, as far as can be guessed, in Bactria, which became the stronghold of Avestic religion and the last refuge of the national monarchy on the Arab invasion. There was a time when his existence was denied, but no one doubts it now. Eight hundred years before Christ is the date which most modern scholars assign to him, though some place him much farther back, while others think they discern reasons for his having appeared after Buddha. The legend of his life (not to be found in the Avesta) begins in the invariable way: he was descended from kings; as a young man he retired to a grotto in the desert, where he lived an austere life of reflection for seven years. Zoroaster never taught asceticism, but tradition attributes to him the season of solitude and self-collection without which perhaps, in fact as well as in fable, the supreme power over other men’s minds was never wielded by man.

Various marvellous particulars are related: he was suckled by two ewes; wild animals obeyed his voice; when thrown under the feet of oxen and horses, they avoided hurting him. In his seven years’ retirement he meditated on idol-worship, on false gods and false prophets. The people of Iran, substantially monotheist but prone to sliding into degrading superstition, offered a field for his mission. He took to him a few disciples and began to preach to as many as would hear, but he met with great difficulties. At last, he found favour with a king by curing his favourite horse, and he might have ended his days in peace but the spirit urged him to continue his apostolate. Not to princes but to peasants did he chiefly address himself; he did not call them away from their work but exhorted them to pursue it diligently. “He who cultivates the earth will never lack, but he who does not, will stand idly at the doors of others to beg food.” Labour is not an evil, man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow is not under a curse: he is the fellow-worker with God! This was the grandest thing that Zoroaster taught. It is singular to note the affinity between his teaching and the Virgilian conception of the husbandman as half a priest. In the Middle Ages the same thought arose where one would not look for it: among those religious orders which had the luminous inspiration that in work not in indolence lay the means of salvation: “_Laborare est orare._”

The care of the God-created animals brought with it a special blessing: it was actually a way to heaven. If a friend gave us a cherished animal, should not we treat it well for that friend’s sake as well as for its own value? Would not it remind us of the giver? Would not we be anxious that he should find it in good health if by chance he came on a visit? This is how Zoroaster wished man to feel about the cow, the sheep, the dog. Auguste Comte considered domestic animals as a part of humanity. Zoroaster considered them as a trust from God.

Moslem traditions finish the story of the Mazdean prophet by telling that he was beaten to death by “devil-worshippers,” probably Turanian raiders. Zoroastrian authorities are silent about his end, which is thought to bear out the legend that it was unfortunate.