Zeradusht.

I see not, how this minute coincidence can be satisfactorily accounted for on the supposition that the Irish legend was the mere forgery of some monk of the middle ages: because, even if a person of that description had been guilty, in the first instance and entirely from his own imagination, of the pious fraud of putting the prophecy of a future deliverer into the mouth of Zeradusht, he could not possibly have known, that that very prophecy was ascribed in the east by Abulpharagius to a Zeradusht who was actually a Daru or Druid of Bokhara. This circumstance, so far I am able to judge of evidence, removes the suspicion of at least a thoroughpaced forgery. Many of the Popish saints are undoubtedly nothing more, than the gods of the Gentiles, whose fabulous history has been strangely transmuted into a pseudo-christian legend: but, if a romancing monk of the dark ages had merely found an ancient personage, revered by the pagan Irish as a prophet under the name of Zeradusht, and if he had been disposed to ascribe to this personage a prophecy respecting the Messiah; he could not have moulded the prophecy and the history attached to it into their present form. Supposing him to have possessed a sufficiency of learning to know that an ancient Persian legislator was mentioned by the Greek and Latin writers under the title of Zoroaster, he never could have imagined, that the Zeradusht of the Irish history had any thing in common with this Zoroaster, because he could scarcely have known that by the Persians Zoroaster was called Zeradusht. But, without such knowledge, which I see not how he could well acquire, it never would have entered into his head to affirm, that the Zeradusht who delivered the prophecy was a Druid or Magus of Bokhara. Or, if he had unaccountably and at hazard made such an affirmation, how happens it, that it should actually turn out to be the truth? For the identical prophecy, which by the old Irish in the west is ascribed to Zeradusht of Bokhara, is given by Abulpbaragius in the east to the very same person; a circumstance, of which a monk in the middle ages could scarcely have been aware.

The necessary result from this coincidence is both curious and important.

1 See Vallancey's Vindic. of anc. hist. of Ireland. Collect, de reb. Hibern. vol. iv. p. 196

-201.

CHAP. III.

BOOK III. There must have been an emigration from Persia to Ireland, by the usual north-westerly route, subsequent to the original production of the prophecy of Zeradusht. But that prophecy could not have been manufactured prior to the time, when the later Zeradusht conversed with Daniel or with some Jews of the captivity; because it exhibits internal evidence of having been stolen from the Hebrew Scriptures. Neither could it have been manufactured subsequent to the birth of Christ: because the actions of the Magi, as recorded by St. Matthew, prove, that they must have possessed the very knowledge which it conveys when they first beheld the star in their own country. Hence the emigration from Persia to Ireland must have taken place between the time of Darius Hystaspis, in whose reign the later Zeradusht is with reason believed to have flourished, and the birth of Christ, which called the expecting Magi out of Persia or Chaldea. But, if it took place before the birth of Christ, then the prophecy ascribed to Zeradusht must also have been composed before the same era: because, since it has been discovered in Ireland, it can only have been brought there by the prechristian emigrants from Persia.

(6.) I think we may not obscurely collect, that the sentiments of Zeradusht himself, respecting the future deliverer, were much the same as those entertained of him, by many of the early eastern heretics, after he had been manifested.

Oschen, we have seen, was equally a title of the just man Noah, for whom the world was renovated by the waters of the deluge, and of the expected just man, who was again to contend with the evil principle in the last ages. Now, since Zeradusht, agreeably to the prevailing dogma of Paganism, already maintained, that Oschen or Key-Umursh or the great father would hereafter appear at the beginning of a new world as he had heretofore appeared at the beginning of the present and the antediluvian worlds; and, since he further knew, that that same great father, whether designated by the name of Taschter or Aboudad or Mahabad or Buddha, was eminently distinguished by a star and was sometimes thought to have been born of a virgin : since these would be the doctrines and speculations of Zeradusht, in common with the other philosophizing theologists of the east, previous to his having seen the prophecies of Balaam and Isaiah, it is easy to anticipate the

theory which he would be apt to adopt after he had seen them. He would CHAP. 111. immediately conclude, that the predicted Messiah, whenever he should be revealed, would be nothing more than one of those reappearances of the great father, which his own mythological system taught him at stated intervals to expect. And such, which we may collect to have been the notion of Zeradusht from the circumstance of his applying the same title of Oschen to the just man whether past or future, was the precise idea of those mischievous philosophizing heretics who so early disturbed the peace of the church. They held, as their successors have done after them, that Christ was a descent of the virgin-born Buddha or Salivahana: and they garbled the already existing legend of the great father, by introducing into it various particulars from the history of Jesus, and by applying them to the character of their transmigrating hero-god.

Whether the Magi, who travelled from the east to worship the infant Messiah, became converts to unadulterated Christianity and renounced the theory which was probably handed down to them from Zeradusht, we are not informed. They returned to their own country, and we hear nothing more of them. But, whether they did or did not acquire more just sentiments by conversing with Mary and Joseph, the report, which they must have brought back with them, would have a strong tendency to sow in the minds of their brethren, already impressed with the belief that the great father was about to be manifested for the purpose of reforming a corrupt world, those seeds, which afterwards produced so abundant a crop of Gnosticism and Manicheism. (7.) The mighty river Voorokeschè, which is mentioned very conspicuously in the second prayer, though it does not appear in the history, I take to be the principal sacred Paradisiacal river of the Persian mythologists. It was to them, what the Nile was to the Egyptians, the Danube to the Celts, the Tanais to the Tauric Scythians, and the Euphrates to the Babylonians: it was to them, in short, what the Ganges has long been, and still is, to the Indo-Scythæ and Hindoos. The original chief sacred river, of which all the others were but locally-appropriated transcripts, is certainly the Euphrates; because it really flows from the Paradisiacodiluvian region of Ararat or Lubar: and, since the Albordi of the ZendAvesta is clearly the arkite mountain, whether the Persians supposed it

BOOK III. literally to coincide with the Armenian Ararat or with the more eastern Meru of Hindoo theology, the prototype of the Voorokeschè must be the Eu

phrates, though it may literally have been identified with some other This sacred river, from the circumstance of its flowing from the mountainous country where the Ark rested, was esteemed a symbol of the oceanic deluge: whence conversely it became a familiar notion with the ancients to consider the sea as an enormous river. Thus the mythological poet Homer speaks continually of the streams of the ocean: thus the Egyptians were wont to designate by the very same title the ocean, on which the Ark of Noah floated, and the Nile, which supported on its waters the ark of Osiris thus also the Eridanus of the sphere, which by some was thought to be the Nile, was, as we may easily collect from the peculiar neighbourhood in which it is placed, no other than the sea or the deluge: and thus, to pass from profane to sacred, Jeremiah, when predicting the future state of Babylon in consequence of the manner in which it was taken by Cyrus, calls the Euphrates the sea. Accordingly, from Voorokeschè arises that rain, which is appointed not only to fructify the earth, but likewise to drive away the evil demons that produce the deluge and to purify the world from corruption.

VI. Thus I have argued, in favour of the genuine antiquity of at least the materials out of which the Zend-Avesta has been composed, from the total dissimilitude of the ideas, prevalent both in the history and in the prayers, to the simple narrative of Moses, on the one hand; and from their perfect similitude to the old mythological notions of the universal pagan world, on the other hand.

The points, which I wished to establish, were these: that the early history, contained in the present Zend-Avesta could neither be a mere transcript from the book of Genesis, nor a total or partial fabrication of modern times,

The Oxus or Gihon for instance, on which Darab is feigned to have been set afloat in a wooden ark, like Osiris on the Nile.

2

Nxɛavolo poawv. Hence our Milton has borrowed his ocean stream.

3 Diod. Bibl. Hist. lib. 1. p. 12.

Eratos. Catast. Eridanus.

Compare Jerem. li. 42. with Bp. Newton's Dissert. x. vol. i. p. 298, 309.

whatever may be the age of the compilation in which it appears; but that the groundwork of this history, like the fables and traditions (for instance) collected by Tzetzes and Ovid, is an authentic fragment of very remote antiquity. The Zend-Avesta therefore, in its present form, may be a comparatively recent production: but internal evidence proves the genuineness of the materials out of which it has been compiled. This is sufficient for my argument, and all that I wish to insist upon.

Now, from the examination to which the history and the prayers have been subjected, I will venture to avow my belief, that they can neither have been the original arbitrary invention of a late writer, nor yet a garbled transcript from the Pentateuch; though an acquaintance with the sacred volume may have produced a chronological regularity of arrangement. Whoever compiled the Zend-Avesta, the early history contained in it is no modern figment.

The minute accordance of its mythology with the ancient mythologies of other nations, more especially in those particulars where the accordance has very little the semblance of being industriously laboured or designed, shews, that, let who may be its author, he must either have written from old materials, or have been most profoundly skilled in the arcana of the pagan Mysteries. The theology, particularly in the doctrine of the reappearance of the great father, in the exhibiting of him under the symbol of a man-bull, in the describing of him as being astronomically the Sun, and in the mystic intercommunion of the Ark and the Moon; the theology, in all these points, is undoubtedly the same as the theology of Greece, Egypt, Hindostan, Palestine, and Britain and, though (as I have just stated) the author may have been enabled to reduce his story into a regular chronological form through his becoming acquainted with the writings of Moses during or after the Babylonian captivity; yet his mode of telling that story is not scriptural, but strictly pagan.

Nor is this all as the theological opinions, which pervade both the legend and the prayers, are precisely those opinions, which have prevailed from the remotest ages throughout the whole gentile world; so they correspond with and interpret the sculptured rock temples of Mithras, which are still in existence, and which at this very hour bear testimony to the genuine antiquity of those materials out of which the Zend-Avesta has been composed. Thevenot has given a curious delineation of the carved front of one of these Pag. Idol.

VOL. II.

CHAP. III.